Ignoring your sarcasm, if you aren't using junk turrets, were you talking about shotgun turrets or something?
Was the generator producing enough power? Were they angled correctly?
You can only have 1 junk turret active at a time unless you leveled the skill.
You also need to be within a certain range from your turret for it to be active.
I usually rely mostly on looting the first week since I usually don't have much recipes unlocked anyway.
I do build a farm plot in the first few days for the challenge, but after that it's mostly as I get the mats for more plots without specifically looking for them.
I usually go strenght in my single player games. Usually the path I go looks like this:
7-10 points Strenght with points in pack mules and the Sledge perks
5 points (6?) To get points in agility and parkour 2
1 point cooking
1 point farming
Go back to strenght until Strenght 8-9 with Sledge...
No, they were always part of the PC version. Just because you didn't know about them doesn't mean they didn't exist.
This is just a case of you discovering console commands and using them to cheat instead of using them for their actual function.
I have never felt the need to use the console...