I'm not trying to be snarky, but why can't you just alt-tab and leave the game paused?
Hmm? You can. If you open any menus, during dialogue, the game remains paused. If you open the steam overlay, even without opening the 'pause menu' (inventory menu), the game will pause automatically too. Shameful derp.
Very random note, I remapped my keys since day one and a friend of mine liked it. Here it is:
Primary Action [Left click]: E, Secondary Action [Right click]: Q, Inventory: Tab.
This allows you to attack easily, and holding the attack key seems to attack faster/better than left click. Same goes for holding Q to harvest, and other actions.
About saves..
The 'save scumming' excuse is a pretty weak one. The only two times "Save and Exit" would be exploited is saving at the mine's door, pushing 5 floors, saving again, pushing 5 more floors. Or when trying to catch legendary fish - you could save on the perfect condition to catch, fail horribly, and keep reloading..
But in both those cases, you can just reset the day and head straight to your goal in less than 2 minutes anyway. People who really enjoy the genre will just accept their fate (like me when I died 3 tiles from a stair), and some people will just rage and ALT+F4 (which I did two or three times).
If someone really wants to go through the hassle of having a 100% perfect run and reload at every misclick, just let them do it if it means the majority of your playerbase will thank you for not forcing them to only save at a specific point.
Anyways, IMO he should drop the save scumming argument and just stick to "there would be a lot to do, codewise", which is why I don't think Save and Exit will happen soon personally. I do think he'll consider it once most bugs are fixed, though. I've been following his twitter and he's a super nice guy. "Concerned" indeed.
I prefer saving and leaving on the start of a new day, just because I forget what I was doing. But I'd prefer to have a Save and Exit feature too. Few days ago I got a TON of great stuff from a mine dive, and had to go afk and leave my house with the PC on..pretty silly. I also think at least 5 hours of my game time on steam is when I left the game paused to do other stuff.
Edit: Derp.