All of those concerns are valid, but not quite as much so as when the game was first released; they did tweak the increase in damage you gain from levelling for example, and many of the other issues are fixed by mods.
I linked to my own compilation above, and one of its main purposes is to improve combat (especially to tone down the exponential progression and make player skill as opposed to character skill more important). The "riposte/counter-attack" (proper term in the game is "master strike"), the one that is unblockable, has been severely limited, only triggering very rarely and being very hard to perform for the Player. It's triggered by the same mechanic as the "perfect block", but with a shorter window to press the block button. Without the mod, when you're high level, you perform this all the time when blocking, even against high level opponents. With the mod, it's extremely unlikely to trigger when you're fighting a skilled opponent, and still pretty unlikely against lower proficiency enemies. In addition the extremely OP clinch has been modified to be much harder to abuse, so you now actually have to tire your enemy down before you can win one (and get a free hit, again making it easier to attack or repeat the clinch-hit-spam). You now have to use combos to get past a good defence; the master strikes of your opponents have been toned down, but the probability for dodges and perfect blocks has been increased, so you won't be able to land every combo that you start, which would've made the game way too easy. It's more likely they'll either dodge one of your attacks (in which case you're fine, since you can just restart your combo) or they perfect block you (in which case you'll have to perfect block a potential return blow, and perhaps go through two or three exchanges before one of you either cancel the attack or get hit). All in all, it makes for a much more player skill based experience.
You still need to spar with Bernard in the beginning, firstly to gain the more advanced techniques (perfect block, master strike, and combos), and secondly to gain just a few levels to get your attack speed and defensive capabilities up a bit.
As for the saving, again there are mods out there if you're so inclined.