Ok
So what the the hell is going on with shoving in this game now?
Last time I played, you could shove or throw someone off anything, at your own peril - potentially losing loot of whatever (yawn who cares about loot!).
Now, my game is not letting me shove anyone off anything that is more than a 40ft drop, and not letting me shove or throw NPCs off a lot of things at all. It's utterly bizarre. I've tried reloading multiple times. No change.
This is first time in my entire gaming life that I've felt that something was non-ironically "literally unplayable". I mean absolutely to hell with this if there isn't a fix.
EDIT - Apparently this was a very bizarre bug. It was consistent over multiple reloads, different characters, and there was even a thread on the Steam forums (I know...) saying it was an intentional change. But it's a bug, and Verifying Files fixed it.