"Picking the lock gives extra stuff" is the same thing as "breaking the container gives less stuff" even if it's trying really hard to pretend that it isn't. Neither one is going to be popular and both of them effectively make lockpicking a mandatory skill instead of an optional one.
I don't care about absolute realism either, but neither do I want to come across the absurdity of people unable to get into or out of their own houses because the doors are locked and the keys don't exist so that getting in can be a "challenge", especially since you don't NEED to do that kind of thing to make it relevant.
Fallout 1 and 2 (not 3) are a good example of how lockpicking can be a useful skill without being mandatory. In most scenarios or situations it provides or is part of one of several possible solutions. This is dependent on quest/story scripting allowing for various approaches, but that's fine because DOS is already trying to follow that model as much as it can (within reasonable development limits). That's how lockpicking should be - not an arbitrary "you get more stuff from chests just because" skill.
To the extent that smashing through doors instead of opening them quietly works in the game - you generally take longer to do it and have to keep an eye out for people wandering by, which is already an opportunity cost - the fact that the game doesn't really generate responses to people finding things smashed open is really the only thing that slants it against picking the lock vs breaking it. Individual objects/characters/quest scripts could (and ideally, would) take this into account, especially since (as I pointed out earlier) breaking stuff tends to be noisy and noticeable even if no one has line of sight to the event.
