Meh, sounds worse than it is. You're basically just recording the states of certain objects in a dictionary. It's only a pain when you get to lots of object types..but again, families.
You won't get near the level of control with save/load or even persist behavior, and can do things neither of them allow you to.
In my game there's giant stalactites that can be shot down from the ceiling. They fall down and to the layout below, creating platforms to jump on. (In reality they just fall off-screen...it's implied) By using this method, I can prevent the original stalactites from spawning again, and basically reverse the code to have the fallen platform stalactites spawn. Just one nifty thing you can do.
Could ask around for a plugin, I suppose. Plugin dev isn't my forte.