Autosave & Versions. Is it a bug or well implemented feature?

Question

After reading hundreds of topics and google articles I'm still clueless regarding this autosave feature. Is it an early version of a future product with bugs in it, or it's the final product which is working just as good as Apple originally thought.
It looks like I'm not the only one who has problems with this feature. Please stop advertising the workaround of duplicate and revert. It might be a solution for home users and rookies with no computer background, but not for heavy users.
So the question is simple. Are we an early adopters of a technology which has its issues, and Apple will fix them accordingly ….. or ……..
And my fear is this: This is how it should work and it's a great new feature.
In the meantime how do you solve this two issues thanks to autosave:
Quote from different users
"Add to it that if you have Versions on text documents, it's practically impossible to figure out what you want to go back to and what you want to throw away for any kind of text file longer than one page or so. What are you going to do with the zillions of versions saved against your will, in case you really need to go back to a previous version of, say, a manuscript of 40 pages? Are you going to read all the 40 pages a zillion times? Because Versions does not show you the changes between versions, but the full **** thing!"
"The recipe for self-destruct comes from the fact that, while this by itself is just annoying for business users, the fact that Lion does not support versioned files on network volumes (even an AFP share on a Lion Server) creates disaster. Currently, when you make changes to a file that resides on a server and close it, the original file is modified but no previous version is saved that you can revert to when you open it up next and realize your mistake. Want to test this out for yourself?
Take a screenshot with Command-Shift-4 and move that beautiful image over to your file server.
Open the image up in Preview.
Select an area of the image and hit Command-K to crop it.
Print the image (this step really doesn’t matter, but it’s here to give you an idea of why you would do this in the first place).
Close the image.
Open the image again and try to find a way to get your original image back. Buh-bye, no more pretty screen-shot.
Cry.

Answer 1

MacGuy From Hungary wrote:
Take a screenshot with Command-Shift-4 and move that beautiful image over to your file server.
Open the image up in Preview.
Select an area of the image and hit Command-K to crop it.
Print the image (this step really doesn’t matter, but it’s here to give you an idea of why you would do this in the first place).
Close the image.
Open the image again and try to find a way to get your original image back. Buh-bye, no more pretty screen-shot.
Cry.
Did you actually try those steps?
That is a rhetorical question - of course you didn't. If you had, you would have noticed that as soon as you attempted Step # 5, Lion displays the following dialog:
The remarkable thing about Versions and Autosave is how much research and thought Apple put into the feature. It is a new feature providing new capabilities that have never existed before. No good deed goes unpunished.