Why MEA did not work for me

Casual, Professional, logical, emotional.

Paragon/Renegade (for lack of a better term)
Flirt.

There were a couple of others but those are the main ones.

Maybe you enjoyed playing that kind of Ryder. Mine was a bad ass. Probably even more then either of my Shepards.

I'd recommend coming up with a working definition of "badass" before trying to see whether a particular Ryder fits in that box.

Raising a Remnant fleet.  
Shooting a Black Widow Sniper Rifle one handed and taking out a person who was using Vetra's sister as a human shield. 
Shooting the other Asari in the back and securing the data.  
Telling off multiple thugs in the psychological attempt, and tip toeing on the line between getting shot in the face and just...well...living to see another day.  
Dropping Aroam off a bridge (not saying this is especially bad ass but it demonstrated Robert Ryder's 'I am the Law' attitude he adopted towards the end of the game). 
Led a mutiny against the Andromeda Iniative Cent Com and launched a one team assault on the Remnant City Ship.  
And...well I think that is it.  

Only person which might have told him off was...well no I don't think even Tann did in my playthrough.  Tann told Cassandra off but she deserved it.  Still Robert got his revenge.

Oh yeah I forgot about the looters.  Damn that is a sign you really must play a game again when you start forgetting the small details.  Still though I found it more funny then anything.  

Shooting the stowaway's girlfriend? I wouldn't call that bada**. I call that returning the favor for trying to kill me.

Wasn't that Drack who dropped Aroane? If Ryder was the one holding the guy, that would be bada** regardless if he/she drops him.

She smirked when her dad died.

I can pretend to be a renegade in MEA, but that's the only way I could be.  Dialog and actions don't match up.  In the OT, I had no problem playing as one.  I didn't have to imagine I was one, I could see in his/her actions and read/hear in the dialog choices.   What we got with MEA was a paragon Ryder with different shades of it.  The closest thing to renegade in MEA was about equal to neutral in the OT.  You don't get to choose what Ryder says, only how he/she says it.

This is great if you want a paragon Ryder which you can refine to what type of paragon he/she is, but no matter how you dress it up, it's still paragon at the end of the day.  LIke I said before, we went from at least 3 choices for dialog in about every conversation (neutral, paragon, and renegade) in the OT to two choices in about 80% of the game and most of those were saying the same thing, just in a different way in MEA.

Ryder didn't have to be badass. He/She just had to be charismatic and deliver dialogue with passion and emotion. By my assessment that rarely happened in MEA.

You can play as a renegade Ryder. I've done its. Using the games dialogue and actions. What i meant by imagination was not me pretending to be a renegade merely some peoples inability to use the dialogue system properly...and then blaming the game for it.

And then MEA was forever remembered by its terrible... horrifying animations because that was the only thing that standout, and nothing else. Nice BioWare.