It still amuses me that people seriously try to defend FO3 and it's teen fantasy empowerment plot with kindergarden-level good vs evil tripe. The only half-decent writing in it was The Pitt, which conveniently glossed over any ramifications of your resolution so I guess people didn't think about it?
The rest of the world looked like an amusement park ride... here's crazy survivalist town, and there's cannibal apocalypse town, and here's a bunch of people who live in shacks on a bridge with no farmland. Also, hey a giant bomb, let's put a city here and use it as a tourist attraction. If you don't like those, there's always miles of recycled subway tunnels for you to explore! (hint: it's all ghouls)
Vegas actually felt like a real place... there were farms, slums, gangs. Even the outliers had crops to at least feed themselves. No one was a goth cannibal vampyre, no city full of pre-teens that spits in the face of all logic, no fantasy luxury tower fortress with a nuclear briefcase run by a.... British fop? Comon...
My biggest problem with FO3 was that It took place 200 years after the war. 200. Years.
IRL what have we accomplished in 200 years? Household electricity, flight, computers, medical science, the internet, cars, universal suffrage, etc, etc, et-fucking-c.
What have the people the capital wasteland done in 200 years? Built tin sheds.
To be fair the whole point of a nuclear saturation bombing would have been to obliterate as much infrastructure as possible. Society can't spring forth from nothing, especially when the last working technology is controlled by delinquent fascists like the Brotherhood.