I've only observed this in Goodsprings, but I think it's safe to say that it occurs all throughout the world.
I was wandering around Goodsprings and I saw Sunny Smiles leaving the pub.
I was curious where she slept, so I followed her to some house south of the bar.
I went inside.. and found half the freakin' town just walking around.
Sunny was in the only bed.
Trudy was there, and a few Goodspring settlers.

There are a number of houses in Goodsprings (most of them boarded up and unused).
It seems like a small detail, but most of the NPCs (at least the named ones) had their own homes and their own beds. (In Fallout 3)
And their AI packages included going to their bed at their house at night.

But Obsidian, it seems, is so lazy that they decided just to cram everyone into a single house at night so they'd at least be out of sight when they're supposedly sleeping.

I've noticed that the NPCs don't have as defined schedules as in Oblivion and Fallout 3. Of course Obsidian has never worked with this engine before, so i guess that is to be expected :shrug: Same with the invisible walls.

I've seen this aswell, although I'm not sure if it's a bug in the A.I. or that they really don't have their own homes.

A lot of details like that have been rushed. Navmeshing is another, hence NPCs spawning inside desks and getting stuck on furniture. When you look at the enormous amount of content that they've pushed into this game, it's not all that surprising. Having done it, I can tell you that making even a simple quest is a major undertaking, what Obsidian have attempted here is astounding - and they've pretty much pulled it off, too!

Maybe everyone except the store keeper and Doc moved into the same house after the Powder Ganger incident and the sleep in shifts.

Yeah, that's a solid justification, let's go with that one.

Oh wait, maybe they had a party and Sunny had a tummy ache.

No No No, you've got it all wrong.

Sunny was having a slumber party. Its a masterpiece of AI to have the NPC's be able to do these things.

Yeah I saw that, on the other hand Novac is fine with each person in the right rooms and such however.

Actualy they live in several homes.. its just that a couple live in that one home. pete lives in anouther home and there is a settler who is always tending his garden out in from of his home.

Doc has his home and chet sleeps in his store.

I've only seen this in Crimson Caravan and I think that one's a glitch, where all the ppl who sleep in one barracks won't spawn/come out for their daily schedule until you enter that barracks at least once. Whereupon they all appear/mill suddenly by the door and exit. Occasionally in other bunker-type places they'll bunch up too, if a lot of them went to sleep around the same time.

So yeah....I think it's mostly glitchy engine stuff rather than specifically super-poor AI. Not that I'm saying the AI is exactly intelligent, either, mind you.

On the other hand, like mentioned, a lot of npc's do have at least some sense of sleep/wake cycles and many do have their own 'beds' they use all the time. My non-sleeping self has to wake up npc's all the time. "Get up you lazy bums, I want to trade/turn in a quest, you can sleep later."

Yeah Crimson Caravan has a lot of that entering the barracks and the NPCS swarming out.
Also for some reason about 10 "North Vegas Residents" were exiting the CC place the other day all walking single file to somewhere, stopping occasionally to chat with each other.

Another design decision, low level processing is turned off when NPCs are not in the same world space/cell as the player, it made me curios when I noticed that after leaving a cell, then returning later in the day the NPCs were in the exact same spot, so I looked in geck, I could not find any with low level processing, so essentially they are frozen in time while the player is not around.

To the OP, I agree, very bad AI packages, I love the game, but I've found it better not to look to closely at the detail because it makes me crindge, once I've completed my current mod I might just start giving them new packages.