So, on top of having to download %90 of a game I bought a hard copy of (the Pip-Boy edition)..which cost me over $100 ADDITIONAL because I'm on a limited bandwidth ISP....I now have to download the entire thing all over again.

B.S. I bought a hard copy, I want a full hard friggin' copy...

You want a hard copy that magically starts having all the patches and updates that will roll in, a year from now? How's that work?

I don't mind downloading an update, fair enough. I have a bit of an issue having to redownload the actual game I bought a hard copy of (after having to download it the first time, when it could have quite easily fit on a blu-ray disc). There's never going to be an update as large as the full game is.

this happened to me, as updating to beta and reverting somehow corrupted some of the ba2 files. All you had to do is verify integrity cache and it will download the correct files. Anyway the fact the your hard copy shipped with few GBs of content compared to it's entirety 25GB it's unfortunate especially for those who have to pay for bandwidth - I am not one of those fortunately. These days they sell us licenses to play games nothing else. There is even no point to put the disk in there just use the space for some booklets, pictures or bigger manual for god sake.

create a backup of the game through steam once it's downloaded, so if it occurs to you to be in this situation again you don't need to redownload.

Last I knew (which was a while ago) the Steam backup was essentially non-functioning. Does it actually work now?

You can also just copy the game files to another location, if you don't want to use Steam backup and you have the spare hard drive space.

I don't know why opting in to the beta would cause a problem, though... it should just require a roughly 200MB download.