It is a balance problem, certainly. I think it's balanced the same way a gamebook and Nethack is: you spend an awful lot of time getting hurt and dying and learning what the route is that gives best rewards for least amount of pain, and then once you have your route optimized, you sick to it until you make your key decisions in the midgame to set up trying for a favored endgame, all the while understanding that a bad stroke of fate will derail that plan almost instantly. (Until you get to endgame and realize that there's a key item that your current optimization doesn't collect, and then you have to reroute.) I think we're supposed to care less about the constantly getting hurt part because the plot moves forward on our choice regardless of success or failure at the checks involved, it's just a question of how much we get hurt in the process and how much we them want to press our luck that the next adventure won't contain something that will wipe the party completely. (And, theoretically, there are nine characters to spread the damage over, so those little nicks and cuts won't be too bad, at least until you reach a combat, or so the philosophy goes, it seems.)

And if we want to go back to base to do things, we'll still have to expend fatigue to add symbols to our fate draw so that we can travel more than one section in that travel action, so going back to base isn't a free action, really, either.

I'm sure it's a rich and epic game to people who are willing to suffer through the learning curve, but I can't imagine how many hours it's going to take just to make it through Sokoban consistently.