before I rebuke you: yes - the game is inordinately buggy. Yes - whoever is responsible for the horrible bugginess of the game needs to fix it.

now...

We're all accustomed to being able to cry on the forums of our favorite MMORPGs for things like "balance" and "game additions," and I'm even seeing lots of posts about how "if obsidian doesn't implement X then they're going to lose money."

The truth of the matter is: the sheer fact that you're hear means they haven't lost money. This is a single player RPG, not a dynamic world like world of warcraft. they don't lose money by you returning the game to the store, Gamestop does. So just calm down and wait, or play something else while you're waiting for the patch to make the game playable. We all know that we'll all be at the midnight release of fallout 4 in 3 years anyways.

You don't seriously think that Gamestop eats the loss entirely if a game is returned as defective, do you?

for a 60 dollar game, the developer gets about 30-40 bucks and the rest is the distributer/merchant. i am guessing this because fallout new vegas during black friday went for 30-35 bucks.

No need to guess. Have this breakdown from earlier in the year.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html