2 shouldn't have had to be less of a game just because EA wasn't willing to give them the time they needed to do 3 right. You are using its quality as an excuse for 3's lack of it.
And its really only Kaiden or Ashley who get screwed.
Liara sits in a chair moaning and asking you to hack stuff 2 minutes from her unless you later bought the Shadow Broker dlc
Wrex sits about and gets little to no time.
Anderson blink and you miss it type appearance and what ever choice you made at the end of 1 is hollow.
Oh Shep you saved all the council? Thanks but we've decided to call you a liar again and pretend it didn't happen.
Joker and Chakwas join the Nazi like group Cerberus because.. reasons
And yeah Cerberus. Clearly a small and nasty organisation in 1 doing experiments on people to misunderstood in 2 to seemingly the largest military group in the universe in 3
Planet scanning.
Most missions have countless hacking to pad the run time.
Think they originally only had around 5 side quests that had you exploring a planet. But gone are the big open areas swapped for linear missions. The dlc they added with the hammerhead didn't fix this.
As for 3 only Tali and Garrus get a decent showing out of 2s squad.
The rest are just bit parts and can't join you you in trying to save the galaxy for.. reason.
We didn't need EDI in a robot body and we didn't need Vega.
It had so little story it left 3 with crap loads to cover with only 2 years development so we got emails or a quick planet scan or deaths on twitter.
Any other publisher would have likely given an extra year or 2 between each game.