You are brave, Rader.
Technically, it sounds like you are making the game as close to the way it'd be if this were truly Earth.
I use Easy difficulty on Xbox, and that is where my Difficulty slider stays! On PC I bump it up to whatever the default difficulty is, but I can only do this because Cho's got all his followers to help him along. Overall, I am better at Elder Scrolls than I am at Fallout.
Yes, no fast-traveling is my fave, that's the best way to get into the gameworld itself. I only use FT if some glitch messes things up (or
I mess things up) and I have to go back and travel some distance which has already been traveled, or otherwise need to go back to a previous save. Sometimes I will RP that my character travels on something motorized, but that's rare.
I like the idea of Survival / Hardcore modes... in my PC games (or New Vegas/Xbox), food & drink & sleep always matter. But I have heard Fallout 4 goes waaaay too extreme about this. Wow, you can't use console commands like tfc? What the hell?
Sounds like you are having fun overall.
All my Thanksgiving cooking is pretty much done, so I'm about to jump into New Vegas myself.