Sorry for stoking more fire into this very hot furnace, but I really dislike this trend of power-users / old-time users of the service taking defensive position for the service they've emotionally attached to, that are ready to write apologetic letters on their behalf. I had enough of that crud on Steam discussion forums (every time somebody would suggest a QoL improvement in their Ideas discussion thread, there are five dozens of users ready 24/7 to tell you "oh, well, that's not how the service works so they will unable to make the change, also you should've read their ToS", sometimes said in very galling and nasty manner), so much so I stopped pouring any money into their service.
Guys, please stop doing that and saying how they had to read ToS before making the purchase - it's insultingly anti-consumer and generally unhelpful.
That being said, @Rick_Carufel - you might as well just opt-out from buying PC games, because there are millions of possible combinations of hardware and OS/drivers software for something to go wrong for just a small set of users. That's something old-time PC gamers just got used to and usually ready to jump through those "idiotic" hoops, as you call it, to make the game run stable.
In your case I would've guessed that it's the multi-core of your CPU that causes the crashes on FO3
If you're actually interested in playing this game, then please refer to
this very simple fix That said, I think that being as much consumer friendly as you can, especially when your major competitors already are, is crucial for success.