No, Minecraft is not horribly coded in terms of saving. It is much more efficient than many other games of its type. A crash will always revert your world by some amount, and there's no good way around it. Also, the client may purposefully revert a small amount of time to leave time before the event that caused the crash occurs again if it is a set event. The corruption is a fixable issue that will likely be resolved in the next pre-release or update, but crashes will always have consequences.
@Calvin Zachary Stasica
No, Minecraft is not horribly coded in terms of saving. It is much more efficient than many other games of its type. A crash will always revert your world by some amount, and there's no good way around it. Also, the client may purposefully revert a small amount of time to leave time before the event that caused the crash occurs again if it is a set event. The corruption is a fixable issue that will likely be resolved in the next pre-release or update, but crashes will always have consequences.