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Alright. So first up, you don't know how to code YET! You may yet learn to code. I think what you want to do is doable, if you are prepared to start dabbling in a bit of code. And as you get more comfortable you can try out more stuff

If you make a button and hit the "Script..." button, you'll see this pop up

on click do
end

In between is where we can put code that we want to run!

In terms of saving, you can save out a copy of the deck using the code app.save[], that's basically the same as hitting the save menu when you're unlocked. So in a button you can do

on click do
 app.save[]
end

With some more advanced coding, there are some other ways of saving out stuff but we'll start simple for now. But if you want a more complicated example, my game The Wayward Mage uses a custom save format that basically saves out the game state in a custom file.

A long game is ABSOLUTELY possible. It sounds like you're looking at basically doing branching purely on cards. If you're finding the "picking the next card to branch to" tricky with having to manually navigate to it, this is another thing that can be easier with code.

If you set up a button to go to a card with a transition, and then open its script up you will see something like this.

on click do
  go["card1" "SlideLeft"]
end

It might be easier, with lots of cards, to basically use this but change the names of the cards manually in the code, like if you know you want to go to a card named "branch2a" you can just write that into the code.

If you're doing visual novel stuff, it could be easier to do things without needing a separate card for each screen. If you use the dialogizer and puppeteer modules that come in the Decker examples folder, they basically let you write and run a whole visual novel script with sprites and a background and text and such. So you're not using a whole card for just one screen of text - you basically just have a card for a background, and some cards to store your character sprites. And then a hidden field somewhere to stash your script. It's again a bit of simple coding, if you look in the dialog.deck and puppeteer.deck files in the Examples folder they'll have documentation.

Finally, if you haven't checked it out definitely take a look at Phinxel's Field Notes, it's a very thorough Decker tutorial that'll teach you some simple coding things among many other Decker tricks, and it doesn't assume any existing coding knowledge. Another thing I've found helpful is pulling apart other people's decks to find out how they did things.