system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Fallout] Why were the Vaults (presumably billions of $ in resources) ultimately just big social experiments that weren't designed to repopulate the Earth, while the actual plan amounted to nothing more than a (big, fortified) oil rig? That seems like quite a mismanagement for the Enclave to make.

Surely trusting that the Enclave would be the only people who needed to survive was an odd choice. I've heard the Vaults were data collection for colonization missions (the GECKs being terraforming devices).  So having a sizable portion of the population survive was just irrelevant, better delegated to telling us a few things about what being in a generation ship might look like?  

If the Vaults were just experiments, why wasn't there a real, super vault other than the Controls (which were few and far between) to really secure survival?
gpt
The war wasn't supposed to happen when it did, if you ask the logistics teams and long-term planners of the pre-war Enclave. The Vaults were meant as social experiments to test various conditions, not for the war, but for long term space travel and colonisation of other planets.

Communism had infected the planet like a disease. The Enclave thought the best option was to bury the entire world in nuclear fire while they found a new planet (probably mars) to live on, and restart society the right way.

When everything started to really go south, they started to make preparations to instead allow themselves to survive the war, and quickly establish control over the planet.

The Enclave didn't care about survival of anybody but themselves. And they achieved that.