As far as I've understood there is no penalty to resurrecting dead party members in Wizardry 8 (in contrary to earlier games where have to live with -1 Vitality).

I suppose one reason for this is the Iron Man mode, where Resurrection is a big part of the game plan I suppose.

Be that as it may, I still refrain to use Resurrection (sell the powders, don't use the spell), but I'm not sure why exactly. I guess it sort of feels like cheating. On the other hand reloading is not exactly any better in terms of "fair play", but this feels totally right to me (don't ask me why).

Anybody else having these "issues"?

I don't feel that it is like cheating, however I always reload when one of my characters die in any game. I have only 2 exceptions:

1. When it is story related.
2. Agarest games. It isn't uncommon to have several deaths in one normal battle. Boss battles are all designed around dying and reviving over and over again.

In a world where magic is rather ommon and heavily wounded creatures restore to full health in 8h,
a resurrection is more plausible than a reload.

Some earlier wizardries were probably impossible to play at least without resurrection or even reload if playing blind,
but Wiz8 vanilla can be beaten on IM with self imposed "one dead game over" rule.

Since some of the mods contain encounters with uberbosses that will nearly always cause deaths,
my goal here is to revive all dead before combat ends, if only to have the xp evenly distributed.
btw the missing xp could be considered as a penalty for dying, if the survivors share would not increase.
This can even be exploited to push lvls of one PC.