The ghoul drug thingy is actually a really good lore addition. It recontextualizes a lot of the games in an interesting way. If ghouls have to take these drugs and make enough money to afford them, the implications on morality of previous ghoul characters is fascinating.

And about the vault tech meeting: this plot point is actually older than new vegas. They took that from the scrapped fallout movie that they wanted to make in the Interplay/Black Isle era. I thought it was absolutely awesome that they researched fallout enough to even know about this obscure thing