Maybe. They amp the Courier up to bullshit levels of resiliency in Frontier, but prying himself off of a cross and still being combat effective might just manage to top them all.
I'd even go a step further and say that the Courier has been tortured for days on end, yet still have them be combat-ready and capable of snapping someone's neck. I remember making an RP of some character I was writing where she broke free of prison after being tortured for God knows how long, only for her to start blowing people's brains out when her enemies were besieged by her allies. If the Courier did that, you bet your ass people won't question the Courier's fighting chops after they rescue themselves.
It is absolutely fucking rushed, no questions there. The problem with the submod in question is that the rescue scene accomplishes exactly one thing: establish team leader Hardcase as a roughly Courier-tier combatant (possibly more, given he has a shotgun that ignores DT and enough health regen to make him effectively immune to small arms), even if only by virtue of his use as the player avatar. The problem is that this doesn't establish a bond between the player or Courier and the group, but it at least manages to indicate why they were such a big deal to the NCR troops. It's like if word got out to the Mojave NCR that the crazy mailman that's been bailing them out at every turn got dropped by the Fiends while trying to recover Pvt Ortega's husband: it's bullshit, and I get why the troops get so bent out of shape over it. Frankly, I wish they'd been more overt about it, say the discussion with Blackthorne having him mention the casualty count, and a line along the lines of "I paid a lot of blood for your life, and I did it in faith that you will make that sacrifice worthwhile" instead of the dick-sucky "only you can make the difference" spiel he gives. This could have at least opened up another line of motivation for the Courier, something of an "I honestly don't give a fuck about any of you, but I do owe you". The structural problems are immense, and the rescue scene is only one of them, but a competent fucking writer could probably have salvaged most of it into something that was at least worthwhile.
As I said before, they shouldn't have the mission be a rescue op in the first place. Just have Hardcase and Wolfpack attack because it's a Legion stronghold, not because some mailman they hired turned into Princess Peach. Have it so that Hardcase's objective is to kill a Legion VIP in that area to cripple their war effort, then have the Courier break themselves out and assist. You can keep most of the scene, just change a few lines and have most of Wolfpack die trying accomplish their objective while the Courier gets to be the one to finish it and kill the Legion VIP. That way, the NCR Exiles are actually forced to recognize the Courier as a badass who broke themselves out of captivity and accomplished something that Wolfpack couldn't do on their own. Instead of feeling bad because Wolfpack died for you, you get to be the one that finished the fight for Wolfpack, so the rest of the NCR Exiles start looking at you as a viable replacement for Hardcase.
I (and the mod in question) were specifically referring to the piloting sequences. They're functional, and that's another testament to the prowess of their technical guy, but all they ever do with it is "spin in circles, mag dump approaching vertibird". I don't want rotary-wing Ace Combat, I want to run CAS, navigating through the skyscrapers to conduct airstrikes on dug-in Legion troops.
And the funny thing is? Older games already did this well. Halos 3 and Reach, as well as the original 2004 Star Wars Battlefront allowed you to load up on a gunship and start raining righteous fury down on the enemy.
Halo Reach even had their gunship level be set in a burning cityscape, as you see skyscrapers falling apart as the enemy glasses one part of the city after another, and you're in a gunship firing on enemy turret positions and enemy aircraft as you're trying to salvage what's left of your forces' position in the city.
Battlefront 2004, on the other hand, allows you to load up a gunship with several allies and rain fire down on the battlefield, on maps such as the Bespin platforms, Tatooine's Dune Sea, Geonosis, and a night level set on Kashyyyk. Battlefront II 2005 allowed you to do the same thing, but only in space, as you load up a gunship to either bombard the enemy capital ship or board it with a squad to cause havoc inside.
They could have just done that, allowed you to load up on a vertibird to start bombarding Legion fools on the ground while flying around Portland's skyscrapers.
