Fallout 3 (like almost all games) didn't have the faction choices of New Vegas. I've thought about it for many years...
The Enclave likely should have been a full-fledged faction from relatively early on. An idea that's been suggested by many before myself. But to make it more than just choosing who to kill, maybe it could have been a battle for the hearts and minds as opposed to just a battle for the splattering of hearts and minds.
There are those eye-bots zooming around playing propaganda, so it's almost like the game was set up for this kind of "conflict." It's not just about killin' everyone, but also the Enclave and BOS trying to win over the support of the people.
A third or fourth competing faction wouldn't have hurt, either.


Tangent: If Fallout 3 had been my personal project rather than something owned by Bethesda and the hears of the fans, I probably would have also worked in a story explanation for the Hub's bottlecap currency to have somehow taken hold in the east, rather than the "it's a coincidence that all Americans suddenly,everywhere, began valuing bottlecaps." The Hub's water merchants would make a freakin' killing if they had a way to access the east coast (which is quite a stretch, sure.) But yeah, at least it would have explained how both the caps and the people not dead of dehydration could exist in the east.

I felt the same way about FO3. It railroaded you to siding with the Brotherhood. I wouldn't have minded it so much if the BOS in 3 was actually interesting. However,they are depicted as the obvious good guys and the Enclave depicted as the obvious bad guys. Elder Lyons turned his unit from an army that simply scavenged old world technology and didn't care for the common wastelander,into an army of do-gooders who protected the wasteland from mutants,raiders,the Enclave and anything else that threatened the people. Granted,this does sound good,it turned the BOS into a one-dimensional faction. The Brotherhood Outcasts were more interesting and I would have loved to seen them be more involved in the game. In my thought process,they would be able to give the player a faction that allowed them to be a more morally gray. Only interested in technology,the Lone Wanderer would be able to work with them in achieving their goal. They would want to attack the Enclave and take the GECK for themselves. For those who would want to side with the Outcasts but still provide water fresh water to the wasteland,the player could hypothetically convince them that to successfully take the purifier,they would have to temporarily form an alliance with the BOS still loyal to Lyons. Together,they could retake the purifier and the main BOS could operate the purifier and provide clean water to the wasteland,while the Outcasts would study the GECK to understand how it works,maybe even learn how to build one themselves. Just my perspective on the topic.

Yeah the outcasts are a good choice for an extra faction.

Would've liked to have joined the Outcasts in FO3. Although I do enjoy FO3 and consider it one of my favorite fallout games, I feel as though they could have gone more in depth with the game. Maybe giving the player a choice to join the Enclave and make them into the good guys or something. Maybe even starting ones own army and driving both forces out of the region.

Fallout 3 was great for its time and rather short life span all things considered but one must not forget where it began really going for the wider generic casul gamer is a main selling point because theres more of those than your hardcore I have 2 powers armors in my basement true fans....but ey mods fix everything like Tales of Two Wastelanders dont think anyone would of bought the games otherwise really

The problem with 3 is that it acted as a reboot to the series, and so they had to reinvent the concepts of factions and branching stories as they went along. This is why you don't really see this done too in depth in 3, as it was most likely the team's first attempt at doing so (or at least the first time attempting it for younger member of the team.) It's also why you have some people compare Fallout 4 as "3 but better," as it was literally their chance to take everything they learned and make a better game out of it.

As for the bottlecap complaint, I actually think it's done rather well. The wasteland is an illiterate, uneducated place, and so most people don't have common knowledge of major trade events, or even the rest of the world. It's HEAVILY implied in 4, and somewhat in 3, that the west coast trades with the east, and so it's most likely that bottle caps simply found their way over over the many years between 2 and 3. This is one of the few good examples of world building done in the games, in my opinion, as it doesn't beat you over the head with what happened. Having some random wastelander just randomly state "oh yeah bottlecaps are a concept taken from the west through trading" would feel horribly forced, and would overall make the whole concept feel even worse. That said, they could have simply had a loading screen stating it, or a computer terminal somewhere describing this happening.

I feel that Bethesda would have better luck creating a better story for Fallout 3 if they sticked to their roots(medieval fantasy story telling) instead of trying to create a homage to the old games.

Thinking about it, there should not be that many guns 200 years after the war since there aren't many people who can maintain them. Imagine a Fallout game where you get different Raider Kingdoms fighting each other out with their makeshift armor and melee weapons, guns and gun knowledge are a precious resource, science/tech is treated as magic by the local folk then they add an external threat kind of scenario(probably enclave/calculator/master levels of threat) at the end.

Personally, I think that would make for a unique and awesome story for a Fallout game.

Yeah, they could have instead created a world very different from the west, but then there probably would have been people complaining about that too,although I "wanted to see how the East was different," and it turns out, not as much as you'd think. The guns are just one more example among many. In the west, the gun runners and a new Reno family were a big part of the reason for there being so many pre-war styled guns.
The thing is, so many of the guns in Fallout 4 do in fact look more like they might be post-war inventions, with fairly limited classical pre-war fallout weapons. And that made a lot of people really mad. So maybe Bethesda knows what they're doing from a certain perspective.

I was sorta disappointed with the Fallout 4 pipe weapons because I was expecting something like a break action weapon that is similar to the Fallout 2 pipe rifle or the Rust water pipe shotgun. That weapon makes sense when everything is destroyed and knowledge of gun making is limited.

Throwing weapons would also make sense like spears/hatchets.

Yeah the pipe weapons aren't really primitive in their function, they just look like makeshift junk.