When you were the only guys walking around in PA that turn you into combat demigods for two centuries, overconfidence is bound to seep in even if the situation is no longer the same. Before now the Brotherhood has not met significant numbers of superior PA in combat.
Given that a guy in T-51B or T-45D PA can go all 'chad in a warzone' and come out with nary a scratch on them because you'll need heavy laser, anti-material caliber, gauss, anti-tank, or (later) plasma weapons to even have a hope to harm the PA...
... you get power issues.
Then there is the fact that a
T-60 series PA managed to be in the
fucking plasma exhaust of a plasma rocket for almost a minute straight... and the T-60 is implied to be simply a T-45 series but
better in the same way that the X-0X/APA series of PA is the T-51 series but better.
Yeah, have fun with
that implication!
I don't recall if it's fanon or canon, but my understanding was that the Brotherhood's eastern expeditions were literally a pressure valve.
Whenever social pressure would build towards them changing their ways, the conservative or Orthodox leadership would basically organize an expedition that oh so very conveniently included those agitating for change.
But instead of maintaining the status quo as they likely intended, all they managed to do is stew in their own juices and become increasingly fanatical in their dogma. Ultimately ending up with a leader who drank deeply from the Kool-Aid pitcher. Who very quickly went full retard and tried to demand that the NCR give up their technology, declaring war when the NCR rightly refused.
With that kind of precedent, assuming these expeditions realized what was going on and decided to make use of it themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if the forces earmarked for this operation are made up of Brotherhood elements considered to be more expendable. Not that they're intended to lose. Merely that they're acceptable losses as long as their goals are achieved.
Though their operation seems to be quite hilariously optimistic. As it's been described, I'd be genuinely surprised if they didn't suffer catastrophic losses.
Well, how I see it is mostly due to actions in canon (main series) and semi-canon sources (Tactics). I wouldn't be surprised that it didn't start until the Founders were out of living memory (so, three or four generations down the line). As fewer and fewer
pragmatic leaders, well, lead the Brotherhood, the more this sort of thing came up...
I wouldn't be surprised that the closer you got to the West Coast (specifically California), the more orthodox the BoS chapter would be.
In
canon Fallout 4, the reason that the Lyons Chapter
became the head honcho of the BoS is that the Orthodox got so soundly trounced that they had
no other place to go. Basically, they
crawled and begged to be allowed in which gave the Lyons Chapter
supreme leverage and thus forced their reforms on the Orthodox. Remember, the entire 'knight oversees recruit' thing isn't new if anything it is probably something that Elder Lyons cooked up as his war against the Super Mutants kept draining his manpower reserves. Aspirants go through checks then probably get sent to a squad who would overlook the rest of the process. What little Maxson did was probably streamline and made it the methodology of choice for those outside of the BoS.
When other people have the same tech level if not higher than you, you start looking pretty silly for trying to go all "Hidden Elf Village" with the occasional us "Elves" are wiser and more refined and better than you dirty animals
Problem is, in this case, that most of civilization is
still not that technologically capable yet. To give a GURPS analogy, the vast majority of the "outside world's" tech base is several tech levels lower than what is required to mass-produce the good stuff, leaving only salvage and
stupidly expensive slow-production of somewhat wide quality of the good stuff. It
also doesn't help that these civilizations tended to also
damage technology in their scrummaging of the ruins of the old world. This isn't Battletech or Warhammer 40k where archeo-tech is a
reality, this is within a period of two centuries and change by FO4.
The majority of post-war civilizations are
getting there, but for all their bumbling about it'll take a better part of a century to do so even during
New Vegas.
