I understand your hate of that card, as it can be very annoying to play against, and creates a lot of dependence on luck (barring brilliant highway-sab combos, and the like)
Having said that, I think almost always the best reaction to saboteur is to ignore it, and in this game buying saboteurs when they were embargoed was just madness.
With your 2/5 opening, embargo was a good call, but either apprentice or embassy would have been a lot stronger than saboteur.
Lets look at Turn 3. On that, you had the bad luck of clashing your two terminals. However, if you had embassy instead of saboteur it would have been a case of playing that, then getting a gold straight off. Turn 3 gold is hard to beat!
As it was, both of you were determined towards building King's Court-Saboteur, which while satisfying was probably not the way to go. The inevitable result, as you saw, is a three pile ending with a load of Kings Courts and Saboteurs in the trash, with one player cursing their luck.
The simulators will show you it better, but generally speaking, Saboteur is one of the weakest $5 cards out there, and certainly nowhere near as good as Apprentice or Embassy. Why? Basically because when you get Saboteured, you get to replace the card with something else if you want to. So if you lose a Province, sure that sucks, but that new gold and slightly trimmed deck will net you your next Province. And mostly you won't lose Provinces, mostly you'll lose Silver...