Really enjoyed Oblivion and FO3 even more. Here's a suggestion for the next game, see if you agree.
In the earlier levels of FO3 when you haven't built up a lot of caps for buying stuff, you have to spend a lot of time picking up coffee mugs, tin cans, books and clipboards that are only worht 1 cap each. It's pretty boring. Then you get overloaded and sometimes have to make a couple of trips back and forth to schlep your loot back to your home or to a trader. My suggestion is that in the next game we have this small stuff be fewer items of higher value...maybe coming out to around the same total for looting a given place, but many fewer items so you can do it quicker and get it over with. Maybe like some paintings worth 12 caps, some coffee table books worht 15 caps, more appliances worht 10 to 20 caps or so. So you can get your loot and get out without the tedious picking up of 64 tin cans and 37 ruined books.

You'll find topics of this nature in the Fallout Series General Discussion.

Edit: Aaaaaand here we are

As for your point, I'll have to disagree. I never found caps a problem, and never found myself forced to hoard 1cap junk to make a living. You have enough finances in the early game to provide on average what you need for the early game, and you can find pretty much anything in the wastes that you can buy in any store, so money becomes meaningless without the necessary sinks (house items aren't enough, and this isn't the sims).

they should just have a difficulty setting that cuts everything in half, meaning you only get half the caps for something, can only find half the ammo and so on and so forth it would make a lot of people happy i think

Uhm... I didn't really find caps to be all that much of a problem, for the most part. I mean, sure - I was usually pretty light on caps early on, but I usually got back to town with enough trade items that I could restock pretty well on ammo and meds, and the important stuff.

If you're scrounging around and collecting cups and plates and other "junk" items - my suggestion would be to focus more on looking for items that have a higher value/weight ratio - pre-war money, cigarette packs and cartons, etc. (You can even trade in scrap metal for a good sum pretty early on if you complete a couple early quests.)

Rather than have these "junk" items (cups and such, that are really there just to provide atmosphere/ ammo for the Rock-It-Launcher) have a higher value - I just think you're going about it all wrong. Part of the minor challenge involved in scavenging items is figuring out what's worthwhile to take with you, what you might be able to get a good price for later on, what looks like it might be useful in later building your own weapons. These miscellaneous items with no real value serve a vital purpose in sort of encouraging you to discern between what's worth something and what isn't.

I first made that mistake back when I started playing Morrowind - I wasn't used to the concept of a game where you weren't supposed to clean out every place you went. But then again most games didn't have random objects you could take with you that didn't serve any purpose. I started out in Morrowind and the first place I visited, I just took everything in sight. Didn't take me too long to realize I really didn't need to be lugging around fifty pounds of cheap silverware.

the wasteland is like 200 years old. most the decent stuff would have been taken already. and who picks up cups and tin cans to sell. TAke things that are worth something like ciggarette cartons/packets, conductors, fission batteries e.t.c.

Use the open topic on FO4 please.

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=963405