Op I do not pity you.

Your problem is your own. It is unreasonable to expect the game designers to balance junk to accommodate your overindulgence in crafting.

If I liked to eat cereal the way you like to craft decorations, would you think it reasonable of me to ask that the amount of cereal in an average retail package be increased 700%?

People with unreasonable desires in video games play on PC so they can use mods console commands to indulge whatever excesses they want!

I like the sense of excitement and the endorphin rush I get when I spy a bottle of wonderglue or duct tape. I was watching one of Many a True Nerd's Let's Plays of New Vegas, and he opened a closet that had wonderglue sitting all over the shelves, and was like, "Oh, nothing good in here." My brain was already screaming JACKPOT before realizing that wonderglue WAS useless in New Vegas.

It is by design, though. The one constant in all crafting is adhesive. I feel like there had to be one item that would sort of gate the crafting a tad, just from a gameplay perspective.

Me, I quite like it that way.

Gotta admit, I was already hating the cheat. Dumped the ill gotten gains, and I'm going to expand what farming I've got. But I think a few posters missed the point. It's about how you want to spend your finite, limited gaming time. I'm going to have to spend some serious time ramping up vegetable past production, and I hate that almost as much as the cheat.

On the other had although building an army of settler followers with modded out armor and weapons sounds great in theory, it doesn't really play out that way in actual settlement attacks. Doesn't really matter, as far as I can tell. Sure, it was never intended that this game be a small scale tactical battle simulater, but it's a pity that there's so little strategy needed to actually defend your settlements. A few things work, a lot of things don't, and the rest doesn't matter one way or the other. Attacks by intelligent groups, defended against by well prepared settlers, would be a lot more interesting.

This is exactly why I use quick travel. If I had time, I'd walk everywhere. But I don't have the time so ... I use quick travel. Yeah, so sue me.

The whole point of the crafting system is the enjoyment of managing, planning, harvesting, modding, etc. It's not about the end product. Crafting in this game is like restoring a classic car. Sure, you could have a car in a fraction of the time by just buying one but it's not the same as personally investing the thought, time and effort.

I understand having limited time- anyone who works and has a home and/or family can sympathize (myself included) but that's why I'm ok with having a game like this take me years to complete. I got a 600+ hour playthrough of Skyrim- started launch day and didn't put down the game till early this year, and still didn't see everything in the game. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying that to approach crafting, or any other aspect of this game, from the point of view of cutting corners and speeding things up would be to miss the point.

It's like saying, man, I want that iPad Pro but I don't have the bucks so I'm just going to gank one. Some people would be cool with that. To me it would be worthless because I didn't earn it.

All of my settlements are connected to each other via supply lines. Adhesives are something I'm drowning in now. Oil on the other hand is where the bottleneck is for me now. I am finding enough bones to turn into cutting fluid to meet my needs. Super Mutant strongholds are getting sick of seeing me every few days looking for bones and I'm not above grave robbing for the things.

I've found that using merchants at settlements and just buying modded weapons and stripping them of their mods is easier than building all the mods myself. I don't have gun nut or science on my character and I rarely have trouble finding any mods I need for guns just by buying upgraded weapons regularly from merchants. My character is at level 70 though and the merchants have leveled stock, so it might be tougher to find the parts you want from merchants at low levels.

As for vegetable paste production, just build a bunch of water purifying pumps at the river in sanctuary hills and regularly use up all the water and tatos/mutfruit/corn you grow and I think that helps the settlement continue to produce more purified water. That's how I set it up thinking I'd need the adhesive, but I'm just selling all the water to local merchants now.

I do similarly with armor. I have Science and Gun Nut maxed for my level, and I mod the heck out of my guns, but my character build didn't leave me room for the extra points in Strength to open up Armorer.

I usually just give my settlers the base combat armour (standard, sturdy or heavy) so I don't use a lot of adhesive. I do always upgrade their weapons to auto weapons though so I end up going through a lot of oil for ballistic weapons or fibre optics for lasers.

Don't forget the issue with purified water not getting collected and deposited into your supply like it is supposed to be, even when you have 100+ extra for weeks in-game time. You can manually collect crops but you cannot fix this type of glitch, especially when the specific details of collecting and depositing remain unknown (no, it is not once per day, it varies far more than that as many people have discovered).

Such issues do tend to lead one to using console commands due to limited play time.