@Mikey
New Vegas sets some unrealistic standards your never getting a antagonist as compelling as Ulysses or the awesomeness of Big MT, also only entry in the post black isle games with actual boss fights,
To be honest nothing - or at least “not everything” - should be set up in a linear fashion where the succeeding thing should be able to surpass the previous thing. You only stumble into the same paradigm of Star Wars and its Death Star and similar devices. If tension in the plot is determined by how threatening or amazing a thing is, you only stumble into self parody or flatten something into a one-dimensional form of itself. New Vegas having its own standards of characters is fine. If Bethesda wants to have their antagonists stand out, they should really work on how their future antagonists/bosses work within the specific setting and against the antagonists within that game, as Ulysses does within the context of NV.