I've seen people make a mistake when talking about New Vegas before where they think the Powder Gangers are default hostile to you but they actually start off as neutral, which is kind of intriguing because it lets you join them to be an asshole, it lets you ignore Cobb if you don't like his shit and work for Eddie until things go south and the NCR try to retake the prison, and I'm not sure how having positive Power Ganger reputation affects the Vault... whatever number Vault it was that got taken over by a splinter group of Powder Gangers whom you can help turn themselves in or not and there's a fun divided vault thing going on where the vault experiment somehow made the powder gangers divide into their own two opposing ideologies as well.
anyways Fallout New Vegas fun, the reputation system made so much more sense than a fucking karma system in 3, it can absolutely be exploited but it can also be exploited in a way that feels legitimately realistic? I always loved doing the thing of pickpocketing NCR dog tags instead of murdering soldiers for them and giving them all to Aurelius until the Legion lets you access their safehouse for the lucky shades and they give you that useful replenishing cache of forbidden (to the legion) goodies. My Courier was often an opportunistic bitch, a yee-haw bitch thief who had a certain radioactive Axe she found in Searchlight that she cleaved everyone with.