@bananasfoster: But then you're talking about plot/story, not gameplay. I don't go into sequels of games expecting the game to explicitly show me the plot of the previous game. Like you say, that can result is just bad writing.
But I realized after playing Fallout 4 myself, and watching other people play it, the game doesn't even explain clearly what VATS is and how to use it. This being my first Fallout game, the only reason I knew about it was through osmosis from the gaming community. And I figured out how to use it only by exploring the buttons on the controller, and then looking at the button prompts at the bottom of the screen. I was able to do it, but that's not at all an intuitive way to figure out how to interact with VATS. A lot of other people I've seen that were streaming it discovered it only by seeing what Q/LB does, and saying "oh, there's VATS, did the game even mention it before now?". And it's not at all the case that I, or these other people, are new to video games.
But with something like settlements, that's a unique gameplay feature to Fallout 4 with many different mechanics in it. A feature that is not at all common to other popular first person shooters or light-RPGs. The best the game does is flash a small message in the top left of the screen about, say, linking things to power sources, and then disappears. For this feature, that's minimally helpful. It's not the case that every mechanic in every game needs a tutorial in the way that you might be thinking constitutes an in-game tutorial. Those messages do work for more basic mechanics, e.g. a message that shows up on the screen saying which button to press to aim a weapon. But not for settlements, or say, how to stagger an enemy in Final Fantasy XIII and how that is significant.
The FFXIII series is a good example of how to do tutorials well. They usually happen during the action/story intensive first 20 minutes of the game, so that the tutorial is not just some off-to-the-side thing you need to go through to continue playing the game. But, more importantly, it allows you to skip the tutorial. And since it was already taking place within the relevant story or action, it's not as if one is now forced to finish a tutorial that is only just a tutorial. Fallout 4 tries to do this, with Sturges asking the player to provide the proper resources for Sanctuary. But the game never explicitly provides an options for showing the player how exactly to construct a bed, or assign a settler to a resource. Players have to suss that out by looking at button prompts, or, again, going to the help menu. Players can "skip" this tutorial-ish missions in the sense that they can just walk away and do other stuff; but that includes new players as well, and it's not as if they'll know how to properly interact with the build system in settlements at that point. But that could be the case even if one was trying to finish those missions.
Games need in-game tutorials in a way that does not equate to comic characters saying "I need to stay away from that Kryptonite if I am to save the city! For I was born on a a planet that is different for Earth, and...". It's a thing that some games do better than others, one that I imagine developers are thinking of ways to deal with in each new game they make; because even sequels of games can be very mechanically different that their predecessors. And I'm not stranger to games that teach you mechanics in a help menu-type way. Metal Gear used to have fairly substantial manuals that explained all of the games mechanics. Could Metal Gear benefit from in-game tutorials? Maybe not, but that's why there are codec calls (which can be skipped), that explain that stuff. But even those aren't always immediately clear.
Also I don't really have a strong opinion about this issue to be honest. But it becomes noticeable in games like Fallout 4.
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