rasblak: I think enabling permanent death on Insane, or for that matter on all difficulty levels, should be made optional and fixed once the new game is started and some kind of special achievement or screen or sex scene :D is unlocked as a reward for completion.
Rato: That is the obvious decision for the next patch and it should be quite easy to do that. But just to give my opinion, i think most of the games miss understand the word "Insane" and The Witcher 2 is one of the few that got that meaning right, so you guys should feel happy about that, "Insane" has to mean "INSANE", not "Very Hard", so i agree with "Death" being "Game Over" (the real meaning).
If perma-death is an optional setting, I'm fine with that. However, I don't see the 'added value' to the player of forcing it. Anyone who really wants to can just force themselves to restart from scratch if they ever die.
I want an Insane where the combat is insanely harder than on Hard, where enemies use better tactics, e.g in the arena I should not be able to just block and wait for them to try hitting and then counter when they recoil.
I, as a customer, see more added value in Insane being Very Hard with optional perma-death than just Hard with forced perma-death.
I'm pretty sure, just about no one will bother with Insane as long as perma-death is active, and the developers knew that. Should we really believe then that they went through the trouble of implementing interesting changes in actual combat difficulty compared to Hard?