I finally wrapped up New Vegas tonight.  While I barely touched a good handful of the game's factions, my patience with this game reached its limit.  The fight for the Hoover Dam was in sight and I simply went for it rather than wrap up loose ends.
 
Now that I have the game on the shelf, I have to say that it's the most disappointing game I've played this year.  There are flat-out worse games for sure, but New Vegas nails the term "squandered potential" in a way no other game this year can approach.  I can't recall a game I've ever purchased with as many bugs as this.  Fallout 3 and Oblivion ran like silk in comparison.  Here are my top three grievances, beyond all the small things like clipping issues and full-on crashes (I had the game completely freeze about four times):
 

1. In a previous blog post I mentioned my companion, Veronica,  that glitched in the Brotherhood of Steel bunker.  She would walk up to the first intercom in the entrance and repeat the phrase, "See you out," over and over again.  After that I couldn't interact with her at all.  I couldn't even fire her and get a new companion.  I thought I was stuck with her for the rest of the game, but mercifully the game reset her back to where I originally recruited her after a while.
2. After I obtained Power Armor Training from the Brotherhood of Steel, I looked up the location of Remnant armor.  It's on a corpse in an area packed with extremely strong Deathclaws.  These Deathclaws have to be the strongest enemies in the game, and there's dozens of them.  I slowly worked my way through the area, drawing them out and picking them off, until I got to where the body was supposed to be.  I spent the better part of two hours combing every pixel of that area for the armor, assuming it just blended in with the environment and I wasn't seeing it.  I went back online to get a better guide, and it turned out that the game just sometimes fails to load the body correctly.  I had to save and restart the game.  Once I reloaded, the body was suddenly there, but so were all 20+ Deathclaws I had previously killed, now surrounding me.
3. The longer I played the game, the longer and longer load times became.  I wanted to pull my hair out on some.  The simple act of going to my suite at Lucky 38 involves:  1. A load screen to fast travel to The Strip's gate, 2. A load screen to enter the strip, 3. A load screen to enter the Lucky 38, and 4. A load screen to take the elevator to my suite.  These load times can sometimes be snappy, but as the game draws out, this many loading screens becomes insufferable.
   

1. As I mentioned, there are way too many loading screens.  Why can't I fast travel directly to my suite at the Lucky 38?
2. The quality of the moment-to-moment gameplay is awful.  Besides the loading screens, the missions you're sent on are uncreative and boring.  Very little content amounts to much more than your average MMORPG quest.  Most of the time I was just sent to kill people and collect things.  The finale at Hoover Dam just made me shake my head as I realized the whole game should have been that epic.  Spelunking vaults is about as interesting as this game gets prior to the finale, and that's not that fun.
3. The factions are shallow.  I wanted to rise through the ranks of Caeser's Legion and usurp him, I wanted to become Head Paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel.  It just doesn't work that way though, like it does in Oblivion.  In Oblivion I could become the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, but in New Vegas my service to Caeser was barely acknowledged.
4. The only companion I ever ran across through normal gameplay was Veronica.  After that, I had to look up the location of Raul.  I never ran into any of the other six companions.  Why are these people hidden?
5. The crafting system is a complete joke because I never had enough spare weight to load up on junk parts.
6. As far as I can tell, the Karma system only influences one line of dialog during the end cinematic.  What's the point?
7. The game overall has too much meaningless, side content at the detriment of a compelling center campaign.  The game completely runs out of steam after the Platinum Chip situation is resolved.