The current way of saving and loading data requires far too much effort for newbie programmers: they have to learn text file IO, string parsing, data validation, and so forth. I think it scares people away from SC.
What's needed is a pair of built-in methods that can save and load a group of variables in binary form. Before calling the methods, the programmer would use an interface to assign variables to a group. For example: game progress, high scores, and settings are all different groups of variables. The method call would be as simple as Save(group).
Each group would be hashed and encrypted to provide some protection against tampering (i.e. cheating). This will never be truly secure because there's no way to truly hide the secret key (it exists in the game executable and can be hacked out), so there's no point in trying to make it perfect. In light of that, the main factors to consider are speed of execution and simplicity of implementation. MurmurHash3 is a fine hash function to use, and RC4 is a good cipher.