I don't want to sing the praises of save-scumming or force anyone to play the game in a different way or anything like that. I just want to make an observation. Take it how you will and respond with your own observations.
In older games, we had less save-scumming. Know why? Because saving a game took a really really really long time. Players had to balance their impatience with their laziness. If they wanted to save the game or reload they would have to consider waiting quite a bit of time before they could play again.
This was removed with quicksaves and quickloads. You got your saving "fix" every 2 seconds and going back to redo a decision could happen in a relative "flash."
Saving a game has has its negative reinforcement removed and the best way older games reduced save-scumming was due to a technoogical limitation.
Imagine having to wait 2 minutes every time you loaded or saved a game. Or 5 minutes. Enough time to get a sandwich and a drink. You can bet loads and saves would decrease. And ironman mode would just become a more hardcore form of this.
Of course, bugs always become the bane of this.
Just an observation. Developers and players can do what they will with this observation. As always, a relevant XKCD comic can be found.
Text:
After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my
impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological
reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which
I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and
only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically
vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.
http://xkcd.com/862/