It's a different game, with a different focus, by a different team. No, it's not Van Buren, get over it. F3 does a lot of things pretty well and it's got its faults, but the only real issue with the setting and lore is that it's set too far ahead to be totally logical. That's a nitpick. Take it for what it is: a post-apocalyptic wasteland with lots of run-down buildings and some nasty mutated monsters. The best thing about the early Fallout games wasn't its detailed backstory, it was the variety of choices, the various locations, the combat, and subsystems behind it all.
Of course, that thread was more concerned with story and writing, but Fallout 3 was hardly some travesty the way some people in that thread would have you believe. It also wasn't particularly great, but we can't have everything that we want.
