This is a good observation, and it's remained a pain point for the series. You can fire up New Vegas and make an energy weapons sniper, but it's going to make the first few missions very painful. (And, of course, you'll replay the same problem when you hit Dead Money.)

There's probably no clean fix while the weapons skills are divided, because the game needs item progression and investing in intermediate skills is so pricy. Really the only big improvement I can think of is offering a handful of quality, low-skill-requirement weapons like NV's Weathered 10mm to tide players over.

Still, the series has definitely advanced from the Temple of Trials approach, where it had been overdone to make the gameplay unpleasant.

I'm comfortable with "energy weapons" being a special skill you only want to pump up later in the game. If I remember correctly, in the original Wasteland, when you first create a character, Energy Weapons isn't even an available skill. You have to find it first out in the world. The first two Fallouts work that way in practice even if you can technically spec yourself up as a primitive tribal with a bizarre understanding of Energy Weapons.

This would make a lot of sense, they're theoretically special and uncommon weapons. My sense was that it came with two problems in FO3/NV.

First, perks (and to a degree points) felt scarce, especially with level caps. Dumping value into any combat other than Energy Weapons felt like you were backtracking when you switched over - though points were cheap if you took any of the meta-experience perks.

Second, that redundancy felt crappy because the energy weapons didn't really feel impactful enough. Some were fine, like the pistols, but the high-end stuff couldn't outpace guns. They were really heavy, and things like the Tribeam just weren't very good. The Gauss Rifle was solid, but you got it so late and it was so tiresome to maintain and keep loaded that it was hard to justify.

Really the biggest perks of Energy Weapons in NV were the low Strength requirements and the Hyperbreeder Alpha, which was a hilariously cheap and easy way to fight petty enemies. On some level the balance decision just felt wrong - I understand spending more to use Energy Weapons, but why would I if they don't beat Paciencia and Ratslayer?

Perhaps it's just a continuation of the Fallout tradition to promote bullets? In Fallout 2, it was also generally more worthwhile to invest into firearms, and by the end of the game switch to Gauss Rifle/Pistol (and go for aimed shots / critical hits as much as possible). I always felt like energy weapons were there mostly to satisfy people who didn't care that much about stats, and just wanted to see enemies melting down etc.

Well, in Fallout 1 the most powerful weapon was the Turbo Plasma Rifle, iirc. In Fallout 2 it was the Bozar, which took a Big Guns skill to use effectively.

IIRC, weapon base damage translated differently depending on the armor type. In particular, in Fallout 2, the advanced power armor had slightly lower damage resistance to normal damage than it did to plasma and electrical (the latter mattered for pulse rifle). On top of that, gauss ammo had a very high AC modifier (making critical hits easier), and also a high DR modifier (reducing effect of enemy armor). So it was much more efficient against e.g. Enclave soldiers in power suits than its base damage would suggest.

In practice, with a build that maximized small arms from the get go (which also made the early-to-mid game easy), and invested stat points into Perception for those crits, by the end of the game you would be killing Enclave patrolmen with one-shot eye criticals more often than not, making any extra damage kinda moot.

(As I recall, gauss vs pulse is a long standing holy war in Fallout 2 community.)