"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.
Your position seems to be that a person who spends no Ability points at all into Lockpicking should get the same reward as someone who does invest Ability Points.
I am totally fine with just making Lockpick a cosmetic option only useful for alternate solutions, like you want. But if that is all it is going to be, then it is not something I'll ever spend Ability points into. In the beta, the non-lockpicking solutions aren't any more difficult than the lockpicking ones.
It may let me slightly sequence-break, but it does not serve as an alternate approach to let me bypass.
If it doesn't serve a unique purpose, you could delete it and replace with just items, or roll it in with some other skills (like Repair for example) which serve another purpose.
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.
What are you even talking about? No one's saying anything at all about doors and locked houses people can't get into?
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.
Fallout 1 and 2 also have a wildly different skill system than D:OS.
While having Lockpick as one of many multiple solutions may be the way Lockpicking SHOULD work in D:OS, at the moment, it does not
really match Fallout's variety in solutions.
Lockpicking can maybe let you take a couple sequence-breaking shortcuts in the main quest (the murder scene chest, Evelyn's house), or let you get into Esmeralda's private rooms slightly faster than it takes to get the back door key from upstairs.
Fallout would let you either lockpick Esmeralda's door, talk her into letting you search her house, let you blow up a locked door, or hack the computer-controlled rear door to let you in. Right now, you can lockpick, or go up the unguarded stairs and get the key to the house from an empty room. It's not much more effort to get the key than to lockpick.
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.
Again no one is talking about doors. Even if they were, the keys for said doors are basically right beside them for the taking anyway.
