I echo a lot of your complaints Ryn, but I also feel like that's been Bethesda's fault since Fallout 3. They don't really "get" Fallout, especially the post-post-apocalyptic parts in FO1 and 2 (even BoS) that showed humanity successfully rebuilding. Their writers seem dead set on the world being stuck in a nuclear dump. No big cities, no sanity, no stability. Just a bunch of lunatics, cannibals, and weirdos living in the burning garbage heap of post-war America.

Like, it's been over two hundred years since the nukes fell. In modern comparisons, it's been only 80 years or so since Hiroshima and Nagasaki; both nuked cities that have been rebuilt into thriving metropolises. 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, the area is recovering and is a now green nature preserve and home to abundant wildlife. Obviously the Fallout world got hit much harder than that, but after two centuries we should at least have organized, quasi-feudal societies and power structures with their own network of cities and villages. New Vegas is the closest we've seen to that, and that wasn't written by Bethesda. Every time Bethesda writes the series, they pull back to ground zero (and send someone out to find a family member).

I reiterate that I liked the series, but I also treated it more as if it was set in 2196 instead of 2296.

Spoiler: Hank
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Given that the flashbacks straight up said that Vault-Tec was prepared to drop nukes themselves and planned for their own people to take over the apocalypse, I wouldn't be surprised if season 2 reveals that Vault-Tec had nukes stashed away and they figure into his goals going forward. He didn't really nuke Shady Sands because of his wife. He nuked them because Vault-Tec's plan assumed nobody would survive on the surface. Shady Sands and the NCR was a huge obstacle to their endgame of having a subservient group of Vault-Tec raised vault dwellers rebuild things. It's possible we'll actually get a real city in Season 2 and the conflict will be stopping Hank from nuking it again.