Wow, that is not my impression. Nethack inflicts random sudden death. Nethack works dramatically by repeatedly putting you in situations where you have to choose between certain death and possible death.
There are a few sudden deaths not caused by some degree of player error, all in the early game, but even those could be avoided most of the time with sufficiently paranoid play (that most people would find crushingly dull). Beyond annoying things like gnomes with Wands of Death or spike pits with lethal poison, most deaths are caused by reckless combat or failing to take appropriate countermeasures against certain monster types. Skilled nethack players have win ratios of over 60%, vs. people who play for years and never win once.
As evidence, on nethack.alt.org's top deaths list, 10 of the 11 most common game ends are "killed by a (weak monster)", all of which are likely to be player error, including "killed by a water moccasin", which is all but guaranteed to be egregious player error. The 3rd most common is "killed by a wand", which encompases one of the most common "unfair" deaths as well as a fair number of player error deaths. The 12th most common "death" is winning the game. After that, the 13th is again egregious player error, after which are piles more deaths by careless combat, with a few "killed by a *, while helpless" deaths that are again egregious player error.
Reading the source code isn't cheating per se--it certainly doesn't guarantee winning--but it's not required, either. There are a handful of simple spoilers that help a great deal, but most of what you really NEED to know could fit on an index card. Among regular nethack players, almost all are "spoiled" to the hilt, but huge variance in success remains, because some people are better at making rational, methodical estimations of what they can safely do to advance the in-game goals.
Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:
Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder. Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America. Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:
Question 1: Can you list more?
Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all. Which do you think involve enjoying pain? Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?
Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it? Or is it part of a healthy human's nature? If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation? (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors. All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences. No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)
Some hypotheses:
My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism. Otherwise, that could be risky.
These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question: Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?
ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?