Fallout 3 and 4 completely misunderstand what fallout 1 and 2 were about and make no sense in the greater context. Like, the story of 1 and 2 was about coming out of the ashes of the apocolypse and used the retrofuturism as a backdrop for the rebuilding society.

Then fallout three comes along and it's obsessed with living in that retrofuture past. It still has people living in the trash sleeping literally next to skeletons inside crumbling buildings, when in fallout 2 people were actually cleaning up the mess and building new homes.

Also why are they just happening to use caps on a completely separate part of the country when in Fallout 2 the government started minting their own backed currency? A side quest in fallout 2 involved finding something like a milion caps that are now completely worthless, showing that society has moved on and advanced from its barter system.

Bethesda just wants Brotherhood of Steel, Enclave and Super Mutants because that is what fallout is to them, without thinking of them as consequences of the actions of people who were specifically formed on the west coast. The Bethesda fallouts treat all those things as aestetics of what fallout "is" rather than aspects of a story.