Far Cry 2 grouches

Within Far Cry 2 I have found some of the best FPS gaming moments in a long time, however I do wish this game had ironed out its defects and balanced the gameplay a bit more. This is what I wish had been different -

1. Make safehouse/bus stop one and the same thing, and disable other forms of saving the game. This would give a lot more meaning to capturing a safehouse, and avoid the frustrating travel between missions. The difficulty would be much better balanced as well. Reducing the number of checkpoints would help, too.
2. The quests should be about more than just killing people to get to an objective. This game deserves it! Give us more spy missions/missions based in the town involving NPC's. After a while, all the game missions started to get similiar.
3. Use the game vehicles and buddies. Allow us to have buddies who can drive/ride on the mounted weapon.
4. The map was frustrating. Can't there be a detailed map of the whole world rather than the area you are in?

This comes late, but I just installed FC2 again and was playing the earlier missions. This is one frustrating game that could have been great!