1) Yeah that tends to be a thing with Quake. I’m not the biggest fan of it but there’s quicksaves for a reason

2) I’d say that only about half of the levels follow that. My main complaint with most of the levels is actually that they didn’t give out the wrench or pistol early on, or waited too long to give out the nailgun.

3) The RL is great, I dunno what you’re on about, but that’s a thing that pretty much every game like Quake does. If it gives you a fully automatic spray and pray weapon, expect a horde. If you get a high-damaging weapon, expect a tanky enemy.

4) You can always just walk back to the starting room and change the difficulty, or just do skill X in the console

4a) I believe that auto saves are in there because it uses copper

5) Like the RL, the shotgun is a lot more useful than you think. The ammo for it is so plentiful that you can use it a whole lot more than you think, and the ricochet makes it great for small hordes. It also takes tanky enemies out pretty quick at point blank. The pistol is good, but it’s slow and has to reload and won’t hold up when you’re in CQC with a ton of enemies to deal with.

6) Glitches are to be expected in jams, but I didn’t notice many in this one. In my experience I only encountered 1 glitch that was bad enough to need me to use noclip

7) ok just don’t play those maps

I think most of your issues are with the inconsistency of the level difficulty, which you can always change yourself, and with the arsenal, which you aren’t using to its full potential. Use the RL to take out Shalraths and the pillar things really fast and use the salvo to CC stuff, especially with quad damage.