The excessively forgiving checkpointing kills a lot of the "survival horror" in The Last of Us, in my opinion. I still get the vibe and enjoy it, but it's unnecessary.
My housemate watched me play a lot today, and we had a pretty long discussion about the merits of checkpointing and how interactive projects best develop sensations of tension, horror, and survivalism with the player. Was interesting to see his perspective, compared to me. He's definitely very much in the save-everywhere frequent-checkpointing camp, and finds having to retread a lot of ground due to a failure/death to be very annoying and detrimental to his gaming experience. Whereas I'm more the opposite. I like survivalism to be a potent element in the way levels, encounters, pacing, and progression is designed. The typewriter save system in Resident Evil is a classic yet beautifully poignant example of this approach in action.
So yeah, as much as I'm enjoying The Last of Us, the actual horror/tension element is lost on me a bit due how frequent and forgiving the checkpointing is. Similarly for the scavenging and item management. It's not too difficult to cheese some of the encounters and items are plentiful enough that I haven't really had to worry about managing my resources. There's no real long term planning, I guess is what I'm saying, due to how tightly structured and linear the set pieces and encounters are paced.
So far, anywho. Still not halfway, I don't think. Tomorrow after I mow the lawn I'll sink back into it.