A manual "save" button would help, with autosave reduced to (as you say) "crash-protect" (although depending on context that could include up to a full undo-redo tree); I'd especially like an ability to see all the changes that I'm proposing, to add some notes about why I'm making the changes, and to handle conflicts semi-manually. If you're thinking this sounds a lot like git, yes.

I'm happy to have my opinions considered, but I would caution against overfitting to them - most people don't seem to like the UX that I like.