VATS made sense in 1 & 2 due to the third-person isometric design. It feels clunky and shoehorned in a first-person setting. The gunplay in vanilla is awful but mods fix that and make it a proper shooter in a way Bethesda can't seem to manage.

I understand the philosophy of carry weights but fiddling with inventories in Beth games has never been engaging to me. And the mods add a lot of new stuff so it compound the problem. What's the point of adding new stuff if you're not picking it up?