There is nothing to buy that costs that much that's what im saying. You basically just have unlimited ammo and stimpacks and fusion cores pretty easy yet all the caps perks and settlement perks take a huge chunk of your perks, the caps themselves are basically useless once you've crossed that line. Yet selling weapons and armor to get stimpacks and ammo and fusion cores and all that it isn't possible, they quickly add up to the thousands so you have to take all those perks. It's like "go 10 cha + all these perks or don't use power armor or have enough ammo for constant exploring". I think those perks should be like the magazines or something just side perks you get after bartering so much or building so much
I swear you're bipolar lol
I'm not sure what you mean by taking a huge chunk of your perks. You level up forever there is no level cap so you can as many perks as you want. Its exactly like the past two Fallouts in the sense that you start out and ammo/caps is scarce but as you progress everything is more available as your character becomes beastly.
I think power armor is supposed to be special, like your personal tank and probably isn't supposed to be used 100% of the time. In the past fallout games, you couldn't even use power armor until you reached a certain level/point in the game, so it was similar in those games too just a different way of doing it )obviously here it's available from the start). And here there is fuel, so you have to keep that in mind. There is ton of armor and clothing so I think the idea is you should wear your regular armor most of the time and wear power armor during the heavy shit. Of course if you want to use power armor all of the time you can, you just have to be more conscious about what perks to get, saving more caps, etc. It's all up to you.
The settlement stuff is just extra so I'm not sure why your focusing so much on it. The stores are meant to raise happiness in your settlements, they are supposed to represent a functional community, with the bonus of being able to buy/sell with them too. I don't think these small little community merchants should make you a million caps or whatever since presumably all the caps they are making is in-house (the settlers living there and connected communities).
But yeah, if you do raise tons of caps, that's your choice. You go through the game having barely anything if you want. Early on in this thread you were talking about how you want to be rich as fuck and have essentially an infinite amount of caps, and now your complaining that there isn't anything worth buying anymore? That was your choice to focus so much on generating caps, you see what I'm saying? All of that stuff is optional (building a network of settlements, becoming a purified water kingpin, etc). So basically you want more stuff to buy with all of your caps that you spent all of that time to generate? Such the consumer!
For me, I just like playing the game, exploring, killing & looting. When I take a break from that I'll mess around in my settlements, beef them up and make them cool looking and I'll buy/sell stuff when I come across a merchant or just use Trashcan Trisha or whatever her name is and the stores at my settlements for convenience. All of this to me is just an added bonus since this is new to Fallout and the past two games are essentially this game minus the settlements and building options.