system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Fallout] Why is everything still so post-apoaclyptic?

The chronologically latest fallout game (fallout 4) is 210 years after the great war- the difference between today and the British empire. And yet, everything still looks like the bombs fell last week.

Everything's still the moldering ruins of before. No-one's built any new structures, and people who live in the old structures are just squatting in them without even fixing the walls. There's no real industry to speak of. Society is still just "raiders everywhere and isolated groups of a dozen people in makeshift homes". No trade networks, no charismatic leaders uniting the groups, no significant citystates or empires, all the factions basically isolating themselves completely.

Everything still seems like people just took shelter in these ruins a few months ago, rather then having 200 years worth of people living and dying in them. No-one's even tided up or painted the walls.

What's going on? It's been *200* *years*. What's stopping people from moving beyond the squatting in a ruined museum stage of rebuilding?
gpt
There's heavy radiation around population centers that's only within the last 100 or so years begun to drop to non lethal levels.  This slowed population spread greatly for average humans while escaped lab experiments and mutants grew wild and remain a threat to this day.  The heavy radiation has also caused a marked cognitive decline in people leading to an effective lowered intelligence as the population adapted to the radiation.  Fewer older generations passing on their knowledge leading to younger generations learning through self teaching and oral histories which again causes a retardation of recovery efforts and social development. This all coupled with aggressive factional violence from both raiders and technology hoarding groups like the enclave and brotherhood of steel means a massive loss of knowledge and experience to the ravages of the world.  Instead of say mechanics passing on their trade to their children and so on there's a big gap of a hundred or more years where those skills were either lost or jealousy hoarded rather than shared.  We see factions like the NCR building and rebuilding a modern society but other groups aren't as lucky to have such a wide skill base to build from.