I was explaining this to my friend but I want to make sure it's correct myself before I go ahead with these ideas when playing.

Is my quote below pretty much accurate?

That's pretty much it, yeah.

While I adore the crafting mechanics, I feel it kind of breaks immersion a bit. It's the same problem with Fallout 3 really - it's long enough after the bombs hit that you really question why so much STUFF is still lying around. (And the Skeletons! There's one in the Trader Diner and I'm just like "Clean that up...come on now.") Heaven knows I've made multiple runs to places to haul back all the little bits and bobs that you have to wonder why only you, the player, shows that sort of initiative.

Thanks for the answer to my question.

Here's my take on your comment. Figure the United States had a population of 300 million people at the time when the bombs dropped. Let's say 25% died right away and then another 25% died after essential services were disrupted. (I think these numbers are conservative given how the nation suffered "total atomic annihilation"). But in the ensuing 200 years, people lived in a hostile landscape with mutated creatures and Vaul-Tec experiments gone awry. Let's say another 25% of the base population was killed within the first few years after that. Now let's factor in sterility from all the radiation. The problem here now is that we had an infrastructure designed for 300 million people but only 75 million remain to rebuild. And of those, how many would actually be willing to rebuild or would prefer instead to either live hopelessly in squalor or raid innocents for their supplies and food?

Personally I think there'd be plenty of dilapidated ruins lying around and that FO4 portrays it pretty accurately (in an approximation sort of way).

Oh, I've already fanon-ed a theory in my own head to explain away Fallout 3's discrepancies between time past and how hand-to-mouth things were. The fact the Commonwealth is wracked by periodic radiation storms just lends credence to my own interpretation that unlike the West Coast, the East Coast has only recently (in the past fifty years or so) become habitable once again. The proliferation of Raiders on the East as opposed to the West also hampers rebuilding efforts in that regard.

Haha! Maybe I should have paid more attention. I've been going off "harvesting" areas for junk and heading back to Sanctuary. I'll drop all the junk I found on one of the empty house foundation slabs and then manually breaking it all down in construction mode so that I'm not overburdened with Junk.