Who exactly was this game aimed at?

Because I don't think we were meant to disbelieve.  I think we were supposed to lap up Starbrat's "solutions" and not question their logic or validity.  Thus SHepard's disbelief didn't exist, even if the players did.  And thus no meaningful way to express it.  


And I think Bioware took umbrage at the audience for daring to question them.

The farts BioWare were smelling when they made it.

I would hope this game is not physically "AIMED" at anyone.

That said I believe the game was most likely had things gutted to make it viable for as big a crowd as possible.
Incoherence was the byproduct of those gut-ments.

Like the old Babylon 5 series that some say had horrible CGI & the stories were compelling enough.
Which by comparison to the opponent series of ST DS9 that some say had good CGI overload & the story many times fell flat.
And there counter parts that say the opposite... it simply comes down to: You can try but many times you can't please everyone.

Worse thing ever is if you try to please all like combining the two shows above together then you get the Andromeda Ascendant fiasco.
One proof that it does not always work.

The question, then, is what caused the blandness. What's your guess? Just poor execution, or is there something wrong in the design intent?

Too many similar things with OT. Same conflicts in different light. Even the characters are kinda repeats, you have a young asari looking for ancient stuff and a krogan badass (again). Whats next game gonna have? A salarian scientist, a drell assassin, quarian exile? So original?

The new aliens are boring and theres too few of them. There should have been at least 6 new races, which wwould be different from one another, including a truly primitive one where you could have had a true first contact with all the great and morally difficult stuff. Instead we get the draenavi and bony klingon covenant, and some random killbots.

 Angara are not fully realized, and the kett come of just as a bland enemy. Theyre like klingons, but even the klingons in Star Trek Tos were at least written better and had great characters like Kang and Kor. And th remnant are just robots you shoot, theyre not half as intresting as geth, theyre more like the mechs from ME2, or the mechs from Halo (seriously never again take a Halo writer in Mass Effect, let them fuck up their own series, i dont care.).

Recycled things, enemies, animals and quests on the planets.

And did i mention the boring villain, even 30 years ago this villain would have been cliche. Something you see in the cartoons.

And the pay off of all that exploring is what? You get a planet named after you? What about the plot threads? What happened to jardaan, why did they create the angara? Who created the scourge and why? Whats the deal with the primus?

At least ME1 answered something, it didnt just elave us in the dark mostly, at the end of MEA youre pretty much "Thats it? Thats all there was to this one damn cluster in Andromeda? What the hell?", oh yeah buy dlc.... If its even coming now.

This game is still ME tough, like the trilogy(or at least 2 latter games of it), it screams "lost potential".

For the original question, I have a very easy answer: a wider audience.
I dare to say that 99% of the companies these days try to appeal to the "wider audience" . Casuals and veterans alike.
Please everyone a little bit, piss everyone a lot, that's how it ends up working often times unfortunately.
Fallout 4 did it, Skyrim technically did it too, Witcher 3 did it on a smaller degree. They all try to appeal to as many people as possible, it translates into sales.

Problem with that is that you need to work even harder if you want to make the game just as good for everyone. Dumb something down, the casuals may agree, but the veterans wont. Improve a complex mechanic, veterans would love it, but casuals will feel overwhelmed.
I'd like companies to stay truth to their franchises instead to try to bring more people into the fold. But from a sales standpoint they want as many people buying their games as possible, even if that means selling the game's/franchise soul on the process.

The difference being, if you're on the PC at least, you have more than 17.000 mods to choose from. Many of them high quality works of passion, without any money involved, which really make these games so much better by adding what should have been in it right from the start and ironing out the flaws the company never bothered to patch.

I'm not defending this practice (casualization of games), mind you. Just saying how I feel things are these days in this industry.

That being said, I totally agree. For Bethesda games, is always up to the community to fix (when possible) their mistakes. Witcher 3 also has quite a few mods that fix crap mechanics in the game like the potion mechanic.

As far as the original question is concerned. This game as made for ill adjusted weebs who die their hair pink, blue and green.

LGBTQ though I don't know wha the Q stands for.

To me it's exactly the opposite, I like my Sci-fi gritty and serious and I prefer characters to be dull or flawed but to grow on you over time.  My favourite Sci-fi characters are a veritable rouges gallery of sociopaths, cowards and spiteful alcoholics.  (something I only just realised  that's pretty f**ked up)