They are buggy and broken and overpowered in both the good and bad way, all at once. I think they should be disabled until we fix them.
That is all.
Back like in the old days, meh. I’m sure most people won’t miss them.
But how will we learn martial arts?
Kung Fu for dummies? 
Portable DVD/CD players and CDs for learning skills maybe? and stores like Blockbuster? 
What parts of NPC interaction are buggy?
Is trading or training buggy?
Maybe just disable the parts that are causing the most problems?
The part where they can corrupt your savegame by simply existing. I’m getting a little bit sick of getting bug reports about them to be honest.
Understandable. Are you going to disable all the traits that deal with them?
It’s just a matter of placing a text file in your data folder, you can re-enable them by deleting the nonpc and no_npc text files.
Don’t do that, please…
Actually it would be great to rewrite NPC’s code using object-oriented stuff, but it’s a huuuge piece of work.
I second getting rid of them for now. They currently add nothing to the gameplay (and in fact take away from it by being so buggy) and it’s perfectly understandable to be alone in a zombie apocalypse. They’re a funny diversion for about two seconds, but as soon as they start breaking things it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
I could imagine that they could probably be brought back in the near future as more simplistic npc’s, which simply hide in basements/bunkers and trade/give you basic quests. In my eyes, there is a lot more that needs fixing before npc’s need to become fully autonomous skyrim-esque npc’s.