Hm. Not really what I was getting at -- ME was perfectly functional, just the characters, races, inter-racial relationships (non-romantic), exploration mechanisms (eg ME bounds you by plotline, SC2 bounds you by fuel and danger), and world history -- all of the core components that made ME interesting as a title -- were substantially inferior to its decades-older predecessor.

The only aspects it managed to be superior were irrelevant to the main thing it was trying to be