Here's an attempt to explain why the playerbase seems to be divided in to pvp and no-pvp players. And a possible solution for it.
To pvp succesfully, you need a powerbuild. Basically only thing players ask about pvp is what is good a build, they don't ask what is a good strategy to beat the enemy. That's because the only strategy to beat someone is to get top tier stuff and shoot your enemy first. Then you look at the result and hopefully it favours you. I'm sure that gang vs gang pvp has all kinds of nice strategies varying from squad's formation to equipment, but still all those who participate in gang pvp are powerbuilds. In other words, characters do most of the work for players and pvp is only balanced for powerbuilds.
If you want to enjoy all sides of the game, you want to have some charisma, intelligence and luxury perks. But those luxuries do not pay off in pvp in any way, except with charisma you get a merc. But still, pretty face doesn't deal more damage, that's why I always finish cute slaves with sledgehammer headshot to remind them of that. Pvp players might say that they pay "the price" for losing luxuries for improved pvp abilities, however they don't necessarily even want to participate in anything else than pvp so where's the loss?
Because SPECIAL is for single player game, all the skills and perks are geared towards fights against npcs. Npcs have supernatural abilities that have to be countered with pure mathematics and percentages. Similar system doesn't work well in multiplayer game where you fight against other players. For example if this was a fps game, a fonline sniper class would have headshotting autoaim as default feature. In a real fps game, the sniper class is only given a sniper rifle and rest is up to the player's skills.
What should be done to reduce the gap between pvp and non-pvp char effectiveness is to alter the way stat, perks and skills affect the character's firepower and hitpoints. Vision and action points are also important factors.
They should only determine what you can do, not how well you can do it.
If perks, stats and skills would only provide additional options instead of direct buffs to combat effectiveness, anyone could pick up a gun and go fight for whatever he felt worth fighting for. However a differend fighting builds would just have more tricks in their disposal, rather than simply being able to deal more damage and withstand more blows as default. Those tricks just wouldn't help if someone happens to outsmart the fighter and shoot him in the spine with shotgun.