Pretty much. In FO1, FO2, and New Vegas when you accomplish your initial starting goal (water chip/GECK/Benny) the game's only about halfway done at best, but in FO3 you meet your Dad, get Project Purity started back up, and then its immediately right to the end game with Vault 87, then Raven Rock, then the assault on the memorial. If they had another quest or two where you and the Lyons Pride had to raid the Enclave for parts for Liberty Prime before the assault could commence things would have flowed a lot better.
Originally, Doctor Lee was in control of a giant fusion energy source in Rivet City(the door to the cut cell is still visible, but you cannot interact with it, artbook shows what the inside would look like). During The Enclave takeover of Project Purity you would have them invade Rivet City at the same time, and you would have to evacuate the entire city to The Citadel in a giant escort quest. In fact, this is the original purpose of the tunnels underneath Project Purity, Rivet City carrier would also be situated on that same general area before the ship was moved further up. This was cut since the engine(and the consoles) could not handle this much NPCs fleeing, neither out in the open or inside cramped sewers, so that entire plotline was dropped and Enclave is only interested in The Purifier.
Anyways, in the previous script, Lee would not be able to bring back Liberty Prime online, you would have to sneak in(or go guns blazing) inside Enclave controlled Rivet City and steal the prototype fusion energy source to help power up Liberty Prime. Both of the concepts, Rivet City takeover and fusion prototype, were cut around the same time the story had a major re-write(originally Vault 87 would be the highlight of the main story and you would find your dad there, turned into the FEV abomination asset that otherwise just sits in a cell. You would have to kill him right there and then, but Emil decided he wanted to go for his Jesus analogy and re-wrote the story into what we know today)
Anyways, I think Broken Steel fixed a lot of the pacing now that the game was given a proper end game assault mission and post-game quests. Shame it wasn't included as a free update when it is more or less essential now.
The customization options are pretty entertaining, but the base weapons themselves range from underwhelming to obnoxious. There are exactly two semiauto pistols in the game and the only one that's viable at higher levels is a unique item that can be missed if you don't progress the Railroad storyline far enough. The best one handed ballistic weapons in the game are revolvers. A .50 caliber rifle should never become obsolete, but they absolutely do because when you're dealing with high level bullet sponge enemies, you're expected to be using a Gauss rifle if you favor ballistic sniping. The frustrating part to me is that this is absolutely the sort of thing that could have been fixed in the Workshop DLCs (and would have made them immensely more worthwhile) and yet ... no one cared.
Weapon balance in Fallout 4 is a disaster, it took me YEARS to fix it personally, and that's with a LOT of other weapon mods to add missing categories or add some meat to the bones. If you're not running mods, honestly the only good weapons past a certain point are lasers/plasma, gauss, rockets and the two DLC rifles: brush gun/lever action and more importantly, the handmade rifle. You can pretty much ignore all the other weapons once you have that last one, it just does everything better than the other small guns(to the point where the raider mod I installed just give it to every single one of them past a certain level, even outside Nuka World).
From what I am seeing, Starfield isn't any better with balancing and gun designs are even dumber. Depending on Bethesda to craft believable or even good looking firearms is a lost cause.
