Jegus, maybe they aren't dumbing it down like I thought they were :/
I have come around. DUST is great. I'm using JIP to make it a little more tolerable, but JIP is cheaty as hell when you play DUST, It's probably a good thing that any followers you recruit with JIP are just as delicate as yourself. Even a deathclaw I recruited dropped like a sack of shit when I took it up against a bunch of survivors. The only follower i've found that doesn't fall apart or catch fire when things look at it that I've found so far? A ghost from the sierra madre I found wandering around near the GRA kiosk outside new vegas. Gotta remove their limbs to kill them, but DUST seems to have removed that capability, so he seems to be immortal, though he can be knocked out.