| OmegaMnky |
As one of your players (though not in this particular adventure), my opinion is that you do tend to find a good balance between the extremes. You tend to punish ignorance (really dumb and out of character ideas, ignoring the clues you leave, disregarding warnings, etc) and tend to protect us from super bad luck.
The problem you have is that your PCs tend to set up their characters based on a backstory concept and so often their characters builds are suboptimal and way less hearty than one might expect. In addition, some of us are unbelievably suicidal in game. We're talking lemming-like levels of self preservation.
If we died as often as the rules said, we'd lose any narrative cohesion. Since most of us are really invested in the AP story, I appreciate it that you save us from ourselves sometimes. When we get to some higher levels and can start accessing Raise Dead and the like, I think you could let us die more often, at least without sacrificing the story.