PSA - quick loads are weird, I recommend unbinding them from your keyconfig
I also added this as an important callout in a guide update I sent in today.
It's been (to me, at least) a longstanding annoyance that game saves didn't seem to be idempotent - most notably with drug durations. I'd frequently load the game and suddenly my characters were under withdrawal, even though when I had saved they had had sometimes hundreds of seconds left. (edit: another example is stealth status - your stealth status [how detected you were] wouldn't reflect what you were at at time of save, you could easily enter a state where loading your game would put you in combat instead of the stealth mode you were in)
Well, after not playing one in years, I have a run going with a nalpazca multiclass, and I unintentionally discovered that if I manually load the game, the oddity with drug durations completely disappears!
You can reproduce this issue yourself - take a drug, note the duration, quick-save, quick load. Note the drug duration (shortened). Now, manually reload the game. Note the drug duration (back to whatever it was when you saved).
The game shortcuts important steps somehow when doing a quick load, and when you save again, those shortcut-ed steps become persisted into game state (which you can again reproduce with repeated quick-save/quick-load cycles on drug durations). After seeing the impact on just drug durations, I have a strong suspicion that some of the oddities and jank witnessed in the game are related to these quick loads (edit: for example, I had a crazy issue where Twin Stones would become unusable, and this unusability would corrupt all other save games on your install, regardless of party or when the saves were made, this even corrupted the saves of other people who tried out my save to try to debug the issue. someone looked in the logs and noted that there appeared to be a broken game object reference related to twin stones).
Who knows, maybe some of the memory leak issues in Deadfire are also related!
I unbound quick-load from keyboard configs and now just take the extra second or so to go "escape-click-click". Until we as a community discover that certain cheese or tactics you rely on actually need a quick-load cycle, I recommend you do the same too.
edit: i guess you don't have to unbind it, but I just wanted to break my muscle memory. Notably, if you can't quick-load, you can't abort a ship encounter that's going downhill or any other such storybook scene. But given how weird the soundtrack would get sometimes or how messed up the tracking of my rations would get if I quick-loaded a lot during a ship encounter, maybe you shouldn't be able to quick-load during a storybook scene.