I think you are exaggerating the importance of undo/redo. Even in google docs, if you restore from a savepoint you can only go backwards. And besides, the complaints OP got were "I'm losing all my work" - I doubt someone who had
some recovery point would be in a worse position to recover than someone who had no recovery point at all.
(in other words, it's not necessary at all to support this feature from the ground up - it just might be necessary in order to have a third, even better way than "no saves" and "imperfect saves")