Currently I've been force quitting the game each time I die, so I've been paying the "wait" price on death anyways.
Sure it would work better if the game split the save in two pieces, "committed save" and "volatile save", where one is a current save game and the other would be the "diff" between the current save and the last sleep save, that would make the whole process a lot faster and take a lot less disk space, but then the feature now is turning into a huge overblown thing compared to the original proposal.
As for "just play with the current settings" argument, I don't really see the point, since it's already what I am doing