All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
Translated: Crafting + character development + ingame "progress". Three plague wounds of 2238.
If you'll cure these wounds, then we will have:
Every critter drops caps.
Vendors have infinite number of guns and ammo of any choice.
There's no XP and levels, you creating your character like in Opera's character planner, and everyone will be 21st level at start.
Oh noes! It'll ruin whole game, because there will be only slaughtering 24/7 everywhere, and California become arena like in quake.
Well, now is the same, the only reason, that it takes time to do that, so yes... why someone should waste real life time to get gear and 21st level, when everyone can get that since begin?
So, the plague wounds isn't in crafting and character development, but in gameplay itself, it's beta with perks, drugs and weapon balancing, TC, crafting system, and some quests.
"The progress" is stupid killing poor brainless critters, wasting your time and staring to monitor clicking with your mouse, until you get 21st level.
Sometimes, if you have mentats or ....3 CH (lol) you can even complete some quests, but not to get some profit from that, but only to do something else except for clicking on critters and see them dying.
Solar said there will be NPC-faction stuff, which I hope will be the main character development feature, or something with player interaction but impossible to abuse and on any character level, allowing you to reach something. Stupid killing critters in the desert should be simply if you don't know what to do else or too weak for challenge, or even make encounters mostly as obstacle between point A and point B and make it impossible to simply run to exit grid in RT without even engaging combat. Main character development should be in quests and player interaction events, not stupid grinding on mobs. Player interaction events I meant PvP, which isn't abusable, like random duels or fights (probably NPC faction or something).