I think it's much better now. It's strange to see how everyone is a millionare in a wasteland..
You need to do the hardcore delivery job to San francisco which gives, if memory serves, 150 or 200 Rep, which is enough to circunvent the Rep drop. Speaking of which Im late to do my delivery this afternoon, wanna tag along?
After the next update, the threshold will be a bit lower. You still need 1000 reputation to be allowed to enter, but after that you can use the facility as long as you have at least 250 reputation with the Gunrunners.
We'll see how it will turn out. In worst case, it's getting changed again, because the workbench at the gunrunners isn't meaned to be the default one.
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
The other option is to do a quest meant for a pack of top-gear, top-level combat characters with triple-loged alts in case squad#1 dies? And not once but 10 times in a row?
Looks more like you haven't realized yet that this is a different quest.
Is it so hard to have high PE and OD on a crafter?