That's actually pretty funny, because literally nobody could get away with that, for one thing. That and the quests are a matter of opinion, nothing else.
Cash grabs and casualizations of series are the industry's bread and butter; they happen all the time. It's just a marketing strategy.
It depends on your build. You can increase your critical damage, weight management, damage and fire mode. You can argue that it's not as diverse, but the abilities to change the majority (of guns) over to your build is pretty nice. That and it is still rewarding to know which items are more worth picking up than others.
I think something that's universally recognized is that Bethesda has some hardships coming up with interesting perks. Most of the ones in Fallout 4 are either situational to the point of uselessness or just streamlined version of skills.
Speaking of, I've said this a million times before, but turning skills into perks was not a good idea. It basically means that when you level up, you're not getting stronger; every other enemy in the game is, and you can only keep up by picking relevant perks.
The gun mods aren't all that great, in my humble opinion; most of the later-level stuff is just better versions of other, more basic mods. It's just not very interesting.
Changing fire mode is kind of a null argument when you can only do it by finding a workbench; the mods may as well be separate weapons.
All forms of art are derivative. Just because they didn't do something so outlandishly different, it is no longer a work of effort?
I'm sure the various employees that worked on the game did so with great conviction and effort. It's not them that are to blame; it's whomever was directing them.
A lot of small stories are told through environments, notes, and object placement. It's honestly something Bethesda is pretty good at, and in my opinion is one of the short comings of NV. That and honestly I do feel the whole "minecraft" comparison is exaggerated by most people that talk about it, simply because there's more to do in F4 than just build yourself a shitty block house.
I think that this was definitely the case in Fallout 3; though I still found it annoying that these skeletons lying around had been there for some 200 years and nobody had bothered to clean them up or nothing ever moved them, it was still a very nice and redeeming touch.
But Fallout 4 isn't like that. It's not about environmental storytelling through a variety of means to tell a range of stories; it's always skeletons doing something humorous or spending their last few moments drinking or something equally as boring and predictable.
The minecraft comparison is a hyperbole by nature; of
course it isn't "Fallout Minecraft" (that game at least had a grip on what it wanted to be), but the fact that even people outside of this website are drawing the comparison speaks volumes about the general opinion on the settlement system.
. Virtually indestructible.
