It's alright that you can find them somewhere, but just like you said ... it's common now. I mean you can literaly walk around and find crashed vertibirds in some locations ... and of course a power armor next to it.
Yes, they're quite common. I wonder why so few "ordinary" people use power armour in the game. I mean, I've seen only one Gunner commander and one Raider in power armour, and of course the Atom Cats and the BoS. Power armour appears to be widely available (to the point where every Red Rocket station inexplicably has a power armour station), but only few use them. When I first heard about the Atom Cats I thought it would be a whole subculture of PA Hot Rodders, but no, it's just the Atom Cats. Which is kinda funny, because Zeke totally believes that they're the next big thing even though nobody gives a shit about their post-apocalyptic interpretation of a subculture that's been out of date for 300 years.
Another wasted opportunity, really. Which is kind of a running theme in Fallout 4, really. Quite a few good ideas, but half-arsed in execution.
A bit off-topic here, but anyway, let's take a look at the companion Cait, for example, because I just did her quest.
You find her in the Combat Zone, which is a huge fighting arena, like The Thorn or the arena in The Pitt. You hear about it and get the quest to check it out. So you might think, hey, fighting arena, perfect opportunity to earn some caps, eh? Especially since it was shown in the pre-release footage. Nope, the inhabitants are raiders and immediately hostile, gotta slaughter them all. Cait is a pitfighter there and immediately becomes your companion.
Wasted opportunity right there, the whole Combat Zone is nothing but a huge setup to get that companion. It could have been a nice location on its own, but no, all raiders are hostile, all the time. Meh.
Right, now Cait approves of lockpicking, doing chems and being an asshole in general. Do that enough and she'll talk to you about her past. Her backstory is a bit cliché, but good enough. Basically, she was sold by her parents into slavery when she was 18, because, dunno, slavers don't take people under 18? Over the next five years she stole enough caps to buy her freedom and went back to kill her parents. She develops a psycho-addiction and fights in the Combat Zone until the Sole Survivor comes along to murder the crap out of everyone.
When she likes you enough she tells the player about her addiction, which isn't curable by ordinary means. But, thanks to plot magic, there's a vault that was filled with junkies and a special device that can magically cure any addiction. So you bring her there (the vault is filled with Gunners, of course), get three different easy speech checks to convince her to get her addiction removed (all result in the same) and boom, it's over. She changes a bit after the quest (does not approve of chems anymore), but that's about it.
So much wasted potential right there. You have no real options, everything results in the same outcome.
No morally grey choices to convince her to keep her psycho addiction, no reconciliation with her past, no different options to help her, nothing.
Just a sob-story and a kill-quest. Wasted potential.
