Auto save' is in the real world pipeline, possibly in the next point release.
Cheetah hardly ever crashes, so its easy to get complacent about incremental saves. When this happens, a rouge crash can be quite hard to take. When I was using Maya I got quite used to what functions made it crash, So learned to save(And the work was exploratory sometimes anyway as opposed to the commercial contracting I now do with cheetah).
So hang in there. If its not implemented how you imagined, you could mention it in the wishlist, and it will be noted. Martin only has 10 fingers to type code though, and these days I prefer to leave him to it rather than spam the wishlist with my pesky requests.
HTH
AC