On the subject of humanity should being doing better 200 years after the great war

First starters, I do agree with some aspects, such as it makes no sense for humanity not to have tried to rebuild some of these cities or expand settlements into towns/cities. I also agree that for the most part, it makes very little sense for the world to still be as brown and dull as it is.

With all that said, I see a lot of people saying it doesn’t make sense for humanity not to have technological advances to fully rebuild human society. There’s a few issues with this.

For starters, humanity in real life took over 100,000 years to form society and stop being cave dwelling hunters. Some will say: “Well back then we didn’t have the knowledge the people in Fallout do.”

Well here’s the thing, if you could travel to the Fallout universe with the knowledge you have now. How much technological progress could you bring? That’s the thing, is yes, the brightest of humanity has brought technological progress to our society and more smart people are prevalent as your society gets better. But as society gets worse, smart people also dwindle. In an apocalypse, when at least 95% of Earth was wiped out by nukes, it would be hard for the average ghoul or survivor to ever get information on how to build some of the technology from pre war.

People mention the Institute, and aside from my problems with them, I will say, it’s not that complicated because the Institute was completely isolated and their knowledge was retained due to not being destroyed by bombs.

Another thing I hear people mention is the books and various terminals which would contain this technology. First of all, books in Fallout would be severely decayed and damaged and it’s likely survivors would be using the pages for camp fires or other uses. You will never guarantee a full scientific book that is fully eligible and has every page. You can’t guarantee the person reading it even understands it either.

Another thing, human progress does not occur at the same rate. Even in the civilized world, certain countries are less technologically advanced than others for a multitude of reasons. And it’s also not guaranteed that your knowledge will be passed down or even understood. Sure you could form a little settlement that is very technologically advanced, but it would be completely isolated for the most part and travelers would only be able to say that the technology exists, not how it works, unless you taught them.

People also say that the Fallout universe post war already has advanced technology, but it mostly comes from already existing technology or Institute technology. BoS is literally just preserving old technology and trying to get it working again. Other factions besides the Institute also repurpose technology instead of inventing new technology. And very few Fallout characters are innovative with already existing technology.

There’s also information decay. Without modern infrastructure, data would degrade faster than at any other point in human history. Blueprints and manuals are utterly useless without the underlying engineering intuition to understand them.

So humanity still doing pretty bad 200 years later makes a lot of sense to me. There’s a lot of factors they have to compete with. And while
some factions have managed to make more progress than others, it would take a much longer time than 200 years to get something resembling pre war human society. And it’s not like no factions have tried to rebuild. There are factions and groups in the wasteland that are independently trying to form a proper society.