I've had nothing but down time for about 14 months, I don't think that matters. If you are sick of playing the same thing then you're just sick of it.

My mind boggles and (once again) I can't shake off that feeling "yeah, another Bethesda bashing" ....

NV feeling more like the originals? Certainly not for me. Exploring DC alone was just grand and felt more like a post apocalyptic scenario (AND offered more interesting locations) then all of NV together.
Take out the radiation and the storylines and compare the two worlds - which one looks like a post nuclear war one and which like just another desert? You could probably take NV and put up a run-down business / economy scenario without a problem.

Story and writing.... for crying out loud, play a female character up to the point where you stand before Caesar (not to mention joining them) - the holes in the story are so wide, even a blind couldn't miss them.

Dead Money - no idea why you guys keep telling how good it is. From all the DLCs released for F3 and NV, this is the one I would skip now. Atmospere? Yes, though you'll never see further then 15 yards in the whole damn thing. Not to mention that you see how many different enemies in a setting where every corner looks like "I've seen this before" after not even 5 minutes?
I laughed out loud at the grand opening party cut scene part and thought: man, I've seen better stuff on the C64... the only good thing about it, was the personality and interaction with the Brotherhood girl.
Lonesome Road: one gigantic, boring blood feast down a linear path with a storyline where you probably had to take degree courses in Fallout, to make sense out of it from beginning to end. Main outstanding point: the increase in difficulty.
OWB was great, especially story-wise and Honest Hearts exploration-wise.

Meaningful choice instead of murderous psychopath? You pick either Caesar's or the NCR and kill all of the other side. Honest Hearts: pick your side and kill all of the other side. Lonesome Road: kill'em all. Dead Money: kill'em all. Old World Blues: kill'em all. WTF?

I'll keep seeing claims how Bethesda fucked up Fallout and the history of it with F3. I freely admit: I don't see it.
The Brotherhood becoming progressive (with a smaller part splitting up to hold on to the codex) - big outcry. Nobody seemed to care though, that Obsidian went the exact same road with just switching roles, so the smaller progressive part was just Veronica.
While we're at it: let's quickly take the step back to the "better story" part - going with the joining House / independent storyline, you've blown up the remaining Brotherhoods except your follower Veronica. Yet at the end of the game, the (previously unseen) remaining Brotherhood force was all of the sudden so strong, that they took over the solar plant from the NCR.... ... . .
Huge outcry because Bethesda put a "game over" at the end of the main storyline and you couldn't continue to explore the world. Obsidian doing the same (without dropping it later in a DLC) = a rather lukewarm reaction that quickly silted up.

I enjoyed both games and put over 100 hours into each of them. But some if not most critisism put up against F3 but not NV, I just can't re-enact.

I liked it, I was playing it hardcore which made it really challenging. I also hadn't chosen light step which mean that I had to worry about all those dozens of floor based traps. The writing itself was interesting to me and the speakers were a real challenge to figure out. The DLC itself was probably the hardest part of any of the 3D FO games.

I largely agree with you there. I wouldn't have gotten lonesome road at all if it wasn't deeply discounted at the time. Honest hearts was pretty disappointing.

Old World Blues wasn't what I would consider great, but there was quite a bit of story to uncover about the various lore.

You lose out a lot if you choose to take that route. One of the things about FO3 was that you didn't really have to take sides and you could be in good graces with pretty much everybody. With FO:NV you can't be, if you're too helpful with any faction you'll start pissing off other factions and ultimately to complete the game you'll have to piss off quite a few people to do so.

More than that, most of the characters in FO3 were just hanging out waiting to die. The raiders in particular served only to attack the lone wanderer and didn't seem to ever do anything other than murder and torture. The Fiends in FO:NV actually seemed to care about something other than murder and torture if for no other reason than self preservation.

Excellent point, O:A is indeed a combat simulator. Still, I really enjoyed it. In a dialog and exploration-heavy game like Fallout 3, an almost FPS-like combat mission in an entirely new setting was an unexpected and interesting. For me it was just long enough to get the most enjoyment out of, and not so long that it would have become repetitive. The main selling point of that expansion for me is novelty, and it was a welcome change of pace.

As I said before, Fallout 3 DLCs are a bit on the whacky side, but that didn't really bother me at all. If you look at the first two installments of the franchise, you'll see that it never had been overly serious.

The desert changed and it depends where the bombs fell and some time has passed from Fallout 1&2.

So yes, the desert isn't much of a desert because it's full of everything, but it depends what you like more RPG games or walking sims. Just in comparison it's some 17 vs 70 quests.

Comparing writing as F3 as superior is a complete miss.
Remember the good old: "Hi, have you seen my dad? This tall?"

Or you choose House and kick both to the curb (not necessarily killing, I've talked/threatened both Lanius and Oliver into just packing it up), or go at it on your own and create a free Vegas. Apparently you just didn't explore those options. Honest Hearts also has a "run-away" option, and you still have to do some killing, sure, but you can even get the big boss and his cohorts to just turn tail without actually fighting him. All the NV DLC have options like these. And yes, you still have the "murderous psychopath" option, but it's not your only other option. In FO3 at the end of Broken Steel you can either side with the Brotherhood, or play the madman and kill 99% of the wasteland, including yourself. Those are your two options (and that really sums up what I mean by your only options are to follow the story or be a murderous (perhaps suicidal) psychopath, not just that you do a lot of killing, but that the killing option is unreasonable, so not really an option for a sane character).

I like the writing in New Vegas better myself as well, but there are some issues that I have with the factions, and that's true for both games.

SPOILERS AHEAD, I guess.

In New Vegas, moral ambiguity was pretty good as long as the NCR and Mr. House were concerned - one was a military empire that supported old values of democracy but suffered from corruption, the other a firm-handed dictator who was trying to keep the balance of power from getting out of hand in his city. Now, Caesar's Legion... that's a different story. Those guys seemed to miss a motivation altogether. Sure, you could listen to Caesar's bits of social analysis, but for the rest of them, we never really found out what has driven them to kill, maim, and enslave their fellow humans. It seemed like they just wanted a faction to take the role of the boogeyman, and I just happen to find that a bit lazy.

Same thing applies to Fallout 3, and maybe even to a greater extent. There, one could really tell where each faction fits into the classical alignment groups, such as: Brotherhood - good, Enclave - evil, Outcasts - neutral, Tenpenny - evil, etc.

Oh I did that too and created a free Vegas, without Caesar's / NCR / House. Still you have to slaughter through hundreds if not thousands of enemies to get to that point. Killing single-handedly almost all of Caesar's legion just to convince the last one standing to pack it, doesn't make a meaningful choice - at least not in my book.
Same example for Lonesome Road: you slaughter through the whole valley, no other option. With the last one there is, you have to choose - do you sacrifice your companion (which you couldn't take out of this zone anyway and nothing interesting left to revisit it) and let him live or not. If that is a meaningful choice, I'll pass.

You might want to recheck this. The second option as far as I remember is "to kill all non-humans". Last I checked you couldn't pick anything besides human as a playable race.

Actually, Caesar does make sense in a twisted sort of way. He's the ultimate survival of the fittest type, and he's not the first or last person I've heard make such an argument. I don't agree with it, but the idea that the strong should be strong and lord it over the weak for the betterment of the species as a whole is nothing new. The idea is particularly prevalent in post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction. The difference is that in NV you could actually side with them. The motivation is simply the base desire of humans to lord it over others, and it's been there throughout human history, slavery, serfdom, whatever you want to call it. There will always be people that want power at the expense of others. There is a reason that no one who is not the Legion think they will survive more than a decade, though, because that kind of society always falls apart on itself when it gets to that point. Nope, the option is to kill all "non-pure" humans. That includes anyone who was born outside of a vault and has been exposed to radiation which changes your DNA from what the enclave considers pure. That includes you. If you don't believe me, try choosing that path, and drink some of the supposedly cleansed water. Wait a few days.
You are not taking out the entire Legion. Sure, you have to fight them to the point where you can convince them that it's more trouble than it's worth to keep fighting, but that only makes sense. You actually have to kill very few people to get to that point, too. There are quests which reduce the numbers of enemies you face, and most of the fights you can just keep running and let others take care of them. It also makes sense that once you get them to that point you either convince them to leave or kill their leader and then leave the cleanup to the grunts. It would extremely anti-climactic if you had to wipe up more little guys after facing the big guy...

As for Lonesome Road, there is also the question of what to do with Ulysses and what to do with the warheads if you are unwilling to sacrifice your companion or just want to kill some people you consider the enemy. You have choices. Sane choices (that is, no one would question your sanity if you were in that situation and made that choice).

... which completely falls apart, as soon as you play with a (in the legion's mind supposedly) weak female as a character. Hence my unwillingness to consider story / writing as so much better in NV.

... let other's take care of them - i.e. companions? Other NPCs? Companions wasn't possible in F3 for obvious reasons (not to mention that their "immortal" status would be explotive, not a choice) and running to other NPCs could have been done so too. Besides that this hardly makes a "meaningful choice".
As for Lonesome Road - I thought I stated it clear enough, which doesn't seem to be the case. Yes, I'm talking about letting Ulysses live or not and that there's no point in keeping your companion and why so. And yet again, slaughtering 100 enemies to decide if the last one shall live or not, isn't a meaningful choice in my book.

Yes, I get that, I've seen that "I take it because I can" mentality in works of fiction before, and I wasn't impressed with it even then. Realistically, a person can be "evil" in nature, but he will not find a following unless he offers adequate reason for his actions. I know, Godwin strikes, but the Nazis had support because a large portion of the German people were convinced that Germany had been the underdog in many international conflicts and that Jews were to blame for the majority of their problems. That is why the Nazis could get away with the atrocities they committed.

A sociopath or psychopath may have the mentality that he takes things and kills people because he can, but others need valid moral reasons before they join the cause en masse.

Of course, this is just my two cents. I consider the writing of Caesar's Legion lazy. Good villains always have excuses, and really good villains have excuses that make you ponder whether it's the morally superior choice to join them after all.

Except Caesar doesn't think that women are necessarily weak, just that the vast majority are. The members of the Legion that do think this make sure you know it, though they don't go against the express command of Caesar. It still holds up. In most of the fights you run into at the Dam, you have a group from both factions that will fight each other and for the most part ignore you. You can choose to aid these troops and fight the others, but you can also just keep running and let them sort it out. It's a choice. I know when I was doing the Yes Man end game (my favourite of the 4 choices), I did very little fighting, since I didn't care about helping either side come out ahead.

For Lonesome Road, Ulysses is only one choice you have to make. You have to choose what to do with the nukes, too. You can lose your companion (maybe not a hard choice for you, but I liked that ED-E, so I did have a hard time choosing that option), or choose one or both of the factions to bomb. Yes, you had to do a lot of killing (though sneaking by is actually an option in most cases), but this isn't any different than FO3 or pretty much every RPG out there. When it counts, though, you do actually get a choice, not just the sane "Goody-two-shoes" choice and the "Rargh, I'm evil!" insane choice. You can actually choose to do any of the other things and have justifiable reasons for it, even if everyone doesn't agree with you. I don't consider the general good/psychopath dychotomy in FO3 to be real choices.

For the Khans, for instance, you have the options (how depends on which major faction you side with): to get them to join your cause, to get them to move on, to just leave them alone, or to kill them all. In contrast, in the Megaton/Tenpenny quest, your choices are whether to nuke the town or disarm the nuke. See the difference? It's everywhere from beginning to end, to the point where having more options is a huge exception, rather than the rule in FO3. Sure, you can just leave it alone, but you don't complete the quest that way. It just sits there waiting until you make one of the choices.

Well, there are always the Dale Barton's of the world (merchant you meet at the Fort), who don't care what happens to everyone else as long as it's good for them. And the Legion certainly is good for the stability and safety of the regions under their control.

The big problem they had in the game is that they only really told you about that side of the Legion. You never see it for yourself. Yes, the war machine is just a brutal, vicious monster, but that is generally the case with conquering armies. It's been that way throughout history.

A patch may hold up a broken glass, too. Chances are, you completed two quests before that point, convincing two potential wanna-be Caesar's member to not going down that road, BECAUSE of the treatment of womans in CL.
If that holds up for you - fine. But please, don't call that quality writing / storytelling ....

At the Dam, yes. In 98% of the rest of the game, no. Hardly even an argument for me, sry.

Oh, I loved him! In fact, he's the only good I found in Lonesome Road. Still, his only use afterwards is for killing enemies you avoided before or blowing up nukes you missed - choice? Not really.

Neither do I. But roleplaying as well as storytelling has a lot more to offer then just choices.

That's pretty much just assumption and we all know how dictator's attain this "stability and safety".