The Institute are just "mad scientists lol" and that's pretty much the entirety of their motivations and reason to exist. Because Bethesda and Emil never looks at anything he writes beyond a surface level, he had the idea of "Bladerunner but in Fallout" and "50s Mad Science" and went from there. Anything beyond that was just not on the table because it requires looking at the resources at their disposal and thinking about why they don't just use their stupidly advanced technology to rule The Commonwealth with an iron fist. They instead rule "From the shadows" with Synth replacements and secret agents, but that actually just means they have one retarded guy as the mayor of Diamond City who does practically fuck all to actually keep The Institute out of people's mouths.
Turning The Institute into a competent faction would mean you couldn't make generic blown up building post-apocalypse shit and we all know Bethesda isn't into that whole "post-post-apocalypse" thing the franchise was actually about.
Unironically the taste of them and the Railroad we got in Fallout 3 was better than what we got, and it feels like their inclusion in 4 might've been purely to pay off the cameo appearance in 3 rather than something actually thought out and well-planned.
In 3 the head of the Institute himself (Zimmerman) came out personally to find the missing synth and though he had a bodyguard, the way the scientists are depicted in 4 (combat-averse agoraphobic germaphobes with sociopathy), such a thing would be unthinkable. Imagine if they were warrior-scholars with an artificial slave caste like some bizarro Sparta instead of what we got. Hell it's even implied the Institute = Commonwealth. Whilst Zimmerman does besmirch the Commonwealth as a war-torn hellhole, they're also well-off enough to have a police force. And what's more, the synth slavery isn't just institute exclusive.
Zimmerman:
Harkness, you say? Yes... Yes, that makes sense. He used to work for a special branch of the Commonwealth Police, after all... {caught by surprise}
Watts:
The movement I'm involved with, we help his kind escape their Commonwealth-imposed slavery. We help them... disappear. You understand?
(It's funny that Besthesda can't even imply some sort of civilisational development in their own lore. There's also the funny possibility that synths in F3 are built, sold to be slaves for other residents of the Commonwealth, but then escape their owners after a certain point due to their advanced AI, but then get recaptured by the Institute. Whether they're given back to the owner or are just kept thereafter for memory erasure and then re-sold at full price to a new owner is funny.)
The Railroad was pretty much fucked from inception but wasn't as fucked as 4s. We knew it was dedicated to freeing other androids but does free non-androids too when they can. The "synth-first and only" policy of 4's Railroad was crippling conceptually.
Watts:
Yes, if we are able. But there are others in the Wasteland who assist in the plight of human slaves. Our android brethren have only us.
(I'm not sure if Watts implies she's an Android too and escaped Androids then become "human" but whatever, it's basically retconned now)
After their ending in 4 they basically become Witness Protection but for synths. Trying to make the Railroad work as a faction is basically what crippled 4's story and you can more or less tie every issue with 4's plot after the Shaun reveal to trying to make The Institute and Commonwealth's treatment of Synths problematic enough to justify the Railroad's existence. They did this by making synth slavery parallel with IRL slavery of blacks (also force that symbolism), which'd require it to be in the same scale, which required more or less retconning what we learn in 3 of android construction because "easily replicated" = "3d printed, no biggie".
"This particular android... Designation A3-21, is... different. Special. The most advanced synthetic humanoid I've ever developed. The others, like my escort Armitage there, are all older models. Easily replicated. Ah, but A3-21... it would take years to recreate him! So you see, this android MUST be located. At all costs. The others are all... acceptable losses. But A3-21, he is... irreplaceable."
Maybe it's the way it's phrased or my particular reading, but "acceptable losses" does not mean "replicable on a mass scale" but that's just me.
There's a universe out there were Fallout 4 bucks the trend of prior entries and instead of walking out into a shithole, the protag wakes up surrounded by civilisation, maybe a city built around the entrance itself and awed spectators greet the man/woman from the Vault that suddenly opened. It wouldn't be hard to show the marketting all stereotypical, wasteland exploration but keep the actual circumstances of this particular wasteland a secret. Starfield's entire (lied about) schtick as being an explorer on the frontier is better replicable in Fallout, but I'll stop here before I ramble.
Playing Uranium Fever TTW modlist from Wabbajack, going through Fallout 3.
Fuck this POS. I lost 200 xp trying to kill him. Can't even wear his armour yet.
