Why Mass Effect Andromeda is Well written.

While MEA slipped up quite a bit, this is some rather spectacular revisionism regarding DA2. DA2 was a game that did such a bad job of introducing characters and developing relationships that the main character loses his/her sibling before the player even knows who they are. The entire third act is people mutating into giant monsters and exploding with no explanation of wtf is going on and the less said about Sebastien and Anders, the better. At one point Hawke has to deal with the fact that a lunatic has decapitated his mother, sewed her head onto another corpse and reanimated the morbid thing, and his reaction is basically to shrug his shoulders.

Don't get me wrong, DA2 wasn't a bad game but I'm struggling to understand how someone could genuinely point at this and say it was so much better than MEA. That's getting back into the whole 'MEA is a 4/10 game!' farce. 

What was wrong with that scene?

Enough for Bioware to patch it.

a small improvement that wasn't really needed but was helpful. Apparently.

yes because for some reason people didn't understand the emotions Ryder was conveying. I didn't need the patch. I recognized the look on Ryders face. The patch only confirmed it.

No they caved in to the whiners nothing more.

I think that "what's the Pathfinder's job" is taking the implication of poor storytelling/dialogue a little far. I mean, you know what your job is. The disembodied voice of Narrator Guy tells you almost as soon as you wake up from cryo. Your job is to be "responsible for exploring and assessing new worlds for outpost placement and settlement." That's pretty straightforward. 

There was a high number of golden worlds back when Andromeda was first surveyed (presumably because vaults but you didn't know that then). Seven potential settlement worlds were identified, so verifying those worlds is your job. You can't just plop a ship down and start barn-raising. Assuming everything had gone to plan and the Scourge didn't exist, presumably you'd be studying flora and fauna, making sure animals and [insert species] could co-exist, and find out what was edible and drinkable. In addition to just scouting the planet and finding a good place to start settling. 

The reason that the outposts have tried and failed and that there is a settlement already on Kadara and that contact was already made with the angara is not because the Nexus didn't need the Pathfinder. It's because the Nexus was almost torn to pieces when it arrived in Andromeda and they needed somewhere, anywhere, to settle because they were running out of resources. So they went out in shuttles and without a Pathfinder. And then the uprising and yadda yadda yadda. 

This is all pretty clearly laid out.

Hell I've given that exact look on.my.job probably half a dozen times.

Then perhaps you need it to play it again - Orsino, Meredith, countless mages in the streets do literally that in the third act. It's never even explained what the hell Orsino was trying to accomplish.

As for Ryder's reaction - I guess a lot of that is down to opinion. Personally I thought it was pretty good, but the point was more that there's actually a set of conversations around it and Ryder repeatedly references it throughout the game (indeed, there's a whole quest around it). Hawke essentially forgets it and never references it again, despite the fact that at best, it should have traumatised him.

Ironically both the DA and ME franchises have repeatedly shown they can do this really well - DA2 is the odd one out here.

I have about 10 DA2 play-through and I perfectly remember that Hawke has a lot of dialog about his/her mother's death with several characters, including the possibility to alter his/her friendship with Aveline depending on the dialog choices. I don't remember Meredith turning into an abomination at any point in the game.

She was. At the very end of the game. Well, sort of, since we learn what happened to her before. The only thing not making much sense is Orsino. Espepcially when you choose to take the mage's side.

Which is why there should have been Pathfinders on the Nexus.  It made no sense.  If they were supposed to be the Pathfinders, the scouts, they should have been on the first ship to arrive in Andromeda.  Survey the situation, the planets, and make sure they're habitable when the arks arrive.  Exactly what were the people on the Nexus supposed to do while waiting months and months for Arks to arrive with Pathfinders?  Pathfinders should have been first in, first boots on the ground.

Just like each Ark should have been mixed races in case one didn't make it.  That way all races would be guaranteed to be represented in Andromeda.  But I won't even go into the whole structure of the Initiative itself, and how it didn't make any sense.