My comment in no way is intended to dispute your experience.
I've been playing this game from early times. Yes there have been a couple of updates that required me to explore autosaves to get one to load. In general however, I've found that this game generally loads saves without problems. However, while I play with a mod, I also play unmodded, and always have an unmodded save to load. Several times, the unmodded save was the only save that loaded cleanly.
I say this with no disrespect to the modders. They produce their mod, then in the next update the dev may alter, delete, an existing variable or add one to the previous code base. At the end of a modded play through, I load the last save with an unmodded version of the game and save it. Usually when no other save loads that one does, even if I'm loading into a modded update.
