It's your choice, but a fair warning: the only thing bethesda truly learned from the old games when making FO3 and NV was the level of unbalance and brokenness.
One sentence, four different implications I disagree with and will write too much about.
1) Implying F1 and F2
needs to be played with unofficial content installed
- The restored cut content Fallout may be fun but it's sadly not on the same level of quality as the rest of the game. It's ok for a second run when you already know the game enough that you won't mistake the fan content for something the original dev team created.
- Balance changes are always subjective, exchanging mistakes of the vanilla game with mistakes of a fan's opinion. Again, ok for a 2nd playthrough, but why suggest that someone starts with what is basically a modded game.
2) Implying Bethesda made New Vegas
- That's like saying Konami made Skullgirls. Neither is the truth.
- Obsidian was the developer, Bethesda was just the publisher. The different is key, as Obsidian had people from the original Fallout 1/2 team. This results in Vegas actually feeling like a sequel to F2, what with good writing, the world actually having some depth as well as making sense, choices and consequences existing and mattering, moral dilemmas, etc. Surely that is the more notable thing that was learned from previous titles which F3 failed to do.
3) Implying F1, F2, F3 or NV is broken
- I played all of those games as officially patched vanilla and saw no problem with them. All 1.0 versions were buggy, yes, as it is usually the case with RPGs, but the official patches took care of that problem. Any "game is buggy, broken etc" complaints are usually either echoes of playing the fleshly released unpatched version, or people who jumped directly from 1.0 to the unofficial patch, skipped playing with just the official one and assumed all of fixed bugs are thanks to the unofficial one.
- Yes, there are some bugs around after the official patches, it's why the unofficial ones were created after all (and kudos to their creators). But said remaining bugs are minor + few and far between. Chances are a player won't notice any of them during a playthrough without being given a detailed list of "look for these things here". That said, I really can't agree with saying there's any necessity to not play the game in the form the dev team was able to create and polish it.
4) Implying Fallout 1/2 is unbalanced
- I'm mostly a big question mark. I could agree with the observation in F3/NV, what with VATS being god mode, the option to Tab pause combat every 2 seconds to pump yourself full of stimpaks (somewhat elevated by medicaments working over time in NV's hardcore), weightless ammunition (again, except in NV's hardcore), negligible crippling mechanic (again again, except in NV's hardcore), mentioned stimpaks being super cheap and found under every other rock, lazy difficulty slider (turning enemies into bullet sponges that blow holes in you with peashooters), enemies never taking medicaments nor drugs (how is this the newer, more advanced game even), "casual" addiction mechanic, SPECIAL stats hardly mattering (if that counts as a balance complaint), possibly level scaling (moot point).
- I don't know what the accusations for F1/2 are, though. They don't have the problems mentioned above, difficulty makes enemy accuracy and rolls better, the existence of critical hits going hard through armor makes you always stay on your toes, no weapon+armor combination making end-game enemies free to kill and/or not die against, impactful addiction mechanic. Basically I'm not sure what there is to complain about.