It's not cheating to save before a choice, it's even something literally evEryone do in these type of game.
As for the missed dialogue, why don't you use the dialogue history where you can see past dialogues if you missed one by accident ?
Yeah, unfortunately we can't look to their faces in the history, (neither has an option to keep them in screen) or maybe the auto-save could be working a little bit better because it barely saves things from few clicks ago; at least one of those thing could be added or fixed in future updates, let's hope so!