If the institute is destroyed the ground starts to shake opening a giant hole in the ground where the institute building used to be compleatly draining the Boston river as the water all goes down the hole and you get a quest to go down into the hole where you find the wreckage of the institute and deathclaws... many giant deathclaws in the massive FEV experimental testing area with many scientist or super mutants still alive after the blast you would only be able to go down the hole with power armor or Freefall boots equiped. If you joined the institute you would simply get a quest to go down to the area with no wreckage anywhere.

The FEV project seems mostly shut down with virgil leaving. The facility where he was working appears to be completly abandoned which would have not been the case if they were still working on the project.

Bethesda could of course write that in if they really wanted but it feels a bit cheesy with a massive FEV experimentation out of nowhere. I also think the FEV plot-element should remain at a minimum if they didn't drop a very good explantion in on why the institute continued their research on FEV despite getting no result.

FEV is imho overused for something that was still in the experimental stage when the bombs droped. It also couldn't have been that important to the governement because they already had potent soldiers with power armor. So spread of SMs and the FEV shouldn't be that great to begin with.

yes but their was more to the FEV program than just making 4 super mutants in test tubes, they also created Deathclaw from mutated Camelians as well as creating ALL super mutants because they have no reproductive organs, I would think they would need more than 4 tubes to do that and who knows what else they might be cooking up now besides Synths.

Eh, none of that was the Institute though.

See it as an abstraction. They for example only have "one" gen-3 assembly with only one default type of syth comming out. There are also the minutemen who spawn out of nowhere. They are not recruited out of the allied settlements like it is implied but are rather abstracted to suddenly appear depending on the settlements.

You can see in father's terminal that FEV lab is offline which makes it unlikley that they are still working on it. You can see all divisions and their labs on that terminal. There is no indication that they have a massive FEV somewhere especially considering the focus on gen-3 and "phase 3" production. The institutes resources are limited when you first get there.

As an aside, there must be a way into the Institute outside of teleportation. How the heck did their ancestors get there in the first place. It could be blocked by ruble and the like, but there must be some original path. That could be an adventure in and of itself.

Have you seen the Minutemen ending?

I guess not. I have a hard time following that line, it gets soooooo boring listening to Preston. But now, you've offered enough to make me drudge through it.