Blinking is way too powerful of a tool. It just really comes down to finding that ledge for your next jump and your skipping mins of carefully moving through enemy lines. Possession is insanely good, I mean.. Its pretty self explanatory. Get in trouble? Time Stop and easily deal with the problem.
I know all of this is optional. Although it saddens me a bit that in order to challenge myself i need to not use a lot of the game mechanics.

There is a certain satisfaction to that. Balanced gameplay can be boring sometimes and we have so many games with it already. There is always Very Hard difficulty if you want a challenge, pretty easy to die then