How’s lockpicking underpowered? I can carry 10 improvised lockpicks by day two, be experienced with them by day 3, and not have to carry anything more than a hammer for crate popping by day five or so as my proficiencies build - If anything, its a bit stronger than it would be IRL just from how we don’t represent the different kinds of locks, skills and picks needed to get past them. Regardless, the game design is less about balance and more about verisimilitude - It should feel intuitively real. So where do other bypass tools fit in?
On the face of it allowing some other bypass techniques isn’t outside the realm of reason, but being even more specialized attacks (Specialized shims/wire builds to flip bolts on the other side etc) would put them further down the devices and proficiencies line, not “Fast and Easily” - Your not defeating a home front door with the office door card shim attack demonstrated in the video, because I’ve never seen a house that doesn’t use separate deadbolt external doors. These attacks are also not at all well known, while everyone and their dog has heard of lockpicking. Its neither intuitive or natural until you’ve even been exposed to the core ideas and vulnerabilities.
Having appropriate proficiencies, items, and books to hold the recipes for alternatives would probably be fine. Probably a specific book line for crafting recipes, a few points in devices, and 1-2 in fabrication (A catch isn’t difficult to make, you just have to understand the concept behind it for it to work). Without the proficiency developed, it’d be incredibly failure prone though - those experience youtubers make hooking stuff externally look easy, but its a nightmare in reality lol. I’d expect a lot of tools to not break, but end up lost on the far side of the door.
I’m not sure that we’d need to special case metal doors - If they’re pickable, then we can reasonably assume they’re vulnerable to the same bolt attacks. Anything more explicitly secured is usually computer controlled.
Long term if we pursued this line of features, we’d probably want more granularity in locks and doors entirely, like how digital locks just became a lot more prevalent in the game.
My personal opinion on the whole thing? I don’t think it passes muster. The knowledge is pretty isolated, pretty situational, and can be bizarrely counter intuitive as to when it really should and shouldn’t work, and the sense about how hard or easy it should be to access. The whole things gonna feel broken in one direction or another direction just depending on how much LPL someones watched on youtube 