Locusts used to eat entire communities' crops, and move quickly to others, Imagine how fast giant ants could move and repopulate. Or Dr. Lesko's mistake could have went airborne, spreading across the US.
Chris Avellone's opinions are right here. He talks about game design aspects which he liked/disliked, but not about plot elements which get the brunt of the criticism here. Aside from that, you're not going to get an Obsidian employee go on record to thumbs-down a Bethesda creation when they only get to make the game because of the deal with Bethesda.
Well I haven't read that, I was talking about a different article where I heard, I believe it was, Feargus saying how much fun he had with fallout 3 and some stuff he did, and mentioning the team liking it.
But it still doesn't answer his second point. frankly. A spokesperson for a company which is basically dependent on Bethesda for employment is not going to say "yeah, Beth sucks ass."
I too am curious as to where they get all this material. I assume there is a certain amount of recycling done with weapons/etc sold to the Gun Runners along with other scrap, but if they're supposed to be outfitting with what I would assume the majoirty of weapons. with maybe it's heavier wepaons scavenged from the war with the Enclave/BOS. But the volume of weapons produced definitely implies that there is a iron mines, steel mills, that kind of thing. They've got to be manufacturing raw materials somewhere, presumably california. I don't know of any iron mines over there, but I"m sure somebody could wikipedia it and find out. Or maybe they're just melting down all the cars lying around.
Iron Mountain Mine and Eagle Mountain Mine come up. Both are defunct now, but being that this is an alternate universe where Redding is still a mining town, who knows?