My problem is that when you come up with an excuse it's a good one that Bethesda could've easily implemented. The Institute could've killed everyone to divert power, but Bethesda never tell us that.
Ironically you're contributing to this thread, by justifying these stupid plot holes you're giving valid points Bethesda could've easily used to form a coherent story. You obviously like Fallout 4, so I'm stumped as to why they would hire Emil over someone like you- that can turn these absurd and idiotic Bethesderps into good stories.
^this isn't sarcasm by the way. I mean it.
Thank you very much.
I generally cut Bethesda a good deal of slack because there's things which can be inferred or guessed at without being spelled out. Also, there's fun in being able to guess at things but Fallout 4 is frustrating for me as it's very clear to me that they often have plans to have things explained but don't or just don't care.
It feels like an opposite of Skyrim weirdly. Skyrim has a bunch of questions and holes but you know Bethesda has an answer to every damn one of these questions you might raise even when they do retcon the shit out of the game every new edition. They bother to state, "Talos did it" for why it's no longer jungle in Cyrodiil. Here, it doesn't necessarily feel like it's done and I can't help but wonder if the answer was there originally (the Institute mentions it steals power) but got left out because theres multiple writers and programers.
One of my big problems with Fallout 4 is the loss of the written dialogue because that drastically reduced the amount of questions you could ask. You could spend all day asking things in F3 and Fallout New vegas and that's just not an option this time around. Even the terminals feel more full of minutia this time around with only a few like Libertalia's being interesting to bother with. It doesn't reward players who DO want to know all this stuff.
Honestly, I think part of the thing which frustrates me about Fallout 4's story isn't necessarily the lore breaks but the big holes in the personal narrative. I can deal with Jet existing Pre-War and come up with excuses if I have to (the Power Armor is harder) but there's a bunch of missing emotional beats storywise.
You can't discuss or research very important stuff about the narrative in-game. Did Shaun create the Super Mutants? Why can't you bring up your son is a mass-murderer if he did create the Super Mutants? Are the Super-Mutants the kidnapped Wastelands the Synths replace? Can they be cured with the Doctor's serum? What happened to all those missing Wastelanders?
That hurt my personal RPG because these are very big deals. I, for one, would like to know who raised Shaun to be the vicious sociopath he is. You could make an interesting story by having it be Doctor Zimmer for example but he's not in the game.
So you could say the breaks aren't issues so much as it'd be nice to have someone who is the continuity master to answer these questions like in Star Wars (who has one of these) or someone to talk about Fallout like Sawyer did his Fallout Bible.
I suspect the answer is the online video game "The Writer will Do something" which is a satire of how video games are made. Basically, Cabot House was one writers baby while another writer wrote something else and it was all just tied together.