Well, your usage described is basically what is expected. You'd be surprised at how ineffective tugs can be at going into a big battlefield to pick out guys to drag all the way back. More often than not, their intended target gets killed before they get there. Or gets killed right after being picked up. Or during the process of being dragged back to the MRS. The idea with the tug buffs is to make it so that the tugs themselves don't have to be microed all the time and rebuilt constantly, and the tug speed boost is to give them some chance of actually getting SOME ships out of there. Certainly with Starships it's a different story, and the MRS is an invaluable complement to them. So MRS is powerful, but not nearly all-powerful in my experience.
To find your saves, open up the game, look under settings, and you will see a Game Data folder. Copy that file path into windows explorer, and you will see a Save folder -- your saves are in there.