I tried a melee build for a while. Well, melee and explosives and sneak. It was quite a bit of effort but also pretty fun. What eventually got me was that it annoyed me how much damage I was taking when I couldn't reasonably sneak up on people, like if I was walking outside and I stumbled across a raider gang. I could run up to them and beat them to [censored] yah but I would often be turned to swiss along the way. If I had a gun I could have just ducked behind some cover and popped them. Getting fertilizer for the explosives was also a [censored] but I imagine that's just cuz I hadn't found shipments yet. I might try again, maybe.
It's gonna be that or a sniper build. Unarmed and melee is also the only weapons with nice animations for finishing moves. Unless you count exploding bodyparts, but you get that too.
They seemed to skimp on the real time melee combat. Repeat animations, slow attack speed, bad block system, bad interrupt system, stagger locking large enemies, etc.