I personally feel NCR became to "normal" faction for the Fallout setting. Too much of a modern country. I understand the mistakes of the past theme and why people like it, but an argument can be made that it clashes with the settings own style.

Van Buren's design documents show Interplay was trying to return to a more "weird wasteland-y" and less civilized setting. And yes this didn't mean destruction of West Coast, although they had a lot of ideas to diminish the presence and power of NCR.

Understandable, I personally prefer it as well. Just post-apocalypse is in a way a rather confined setting, you can have things changing or developing a bit. But go too much and you end in a setting in another genre that has an apocalypse in it's past.

Post-apocalyptic settings cannot really progress, otherwise they stop being postapocalyptric. Even Interplay tried to turn back the setting into more post-apo because of it.

The bigger problem is that the timeline was advanced so much or that the West Coast was allowed to develop that much.

Yup it's handled as part of generation and usually not available to players as part of a normal/standard VtM game as you need to be 7th gen or lower to go increase the dot limits.

And yeah the char sheet kind of raises as many questions as it answers.

It's definitely looks very heavily modified/homebrewed VtM/ WoD character sheet with AD&D spell schools and spheres bolted to it.

The number of dots has been increased as well from 5 to 9. And I wouldn't be surprised if some other system was in this mix as well.