Constructive Criticism of Andromeda.

I'm annoyed because the "changing mode" is annoying, unnecessary, doesn't make any sense and you have to use it all the time. 

You may not need it, but if you find a very big and dangerous species (say a new kind of thresher maw), you may as well need it. It wasn't a military operation, but of course they must have anticipated hostilities. You don't just enter a new galaxy and find everything is in order and there is no danger. 

By my honest estimation, the mako is about as slow as the nomad in 6-wheel drive... and you can always spam hit the forward boost, even in 6-wheel drive to go faster for a period of time.  Just watch some YouTuber who hasn't sped up the film.

Despite having cars that "can do" (to some degree) what a 4-wheel-drive stick shift can do, there is still demand for a manual transmission... simply because some of us find them more fun to drive.

Also, when you think about it in terms of what is poiintless in the pressing of particular buttons... I would say the entire act of playing a video game is pointless button pushing.  It's pointless to have to assign points to skills... why can't I just start the game fully leveled?  It's pointless to collect armor pieces and weapons I already have.  Why can't the game know just what armor or weapons I need and give a random selection of only those.  It's pointless to have an open world that just tempts you to do a bunch of unnecessary "button-pushing" to clear out an "extra-large" area of the map.

Also, it's pointless to have the cannon on the nomad when some of the weapons in Ryder's arsenal are every bit as powerful as the mako's cannon ever was.

I believe he's pointing out that the argument is fallacious from the start..

Having an armed recon vehicle does not make the AI a military operation, any more than the fact the Pathfinder team are armed makes it one. I could handle the argument that the same questionable idealism that drove them to fly to a totally uncharted galaxy without even point defence weaponry on their ships - something even Star Trek's Starfleet would consider to be irresponsible - is also responsible for them believing the Pathfinder team would never shoot anything, but the idea that they thought they'd need combat skills and personal weaponry but would never ever face anything bigger just doesn't make sense. I mean, what data are they basing such an arbitrary threat analysis on?

Besides, aside from the lack of turret, the Nomad is basically a 'tank' (at least in the sense the Mako was). It was specifically designed as a military vehicle.

Well, it can't be both. Either what the AI is, is relevant, in which case it's an argument about whether or not armed Pathfinder vehicles contradict the AI's view of itself, or it's not relevant, in which case there is no argument and the vehicle should have been armed in the same way the team is for the same reasons they are.

As for the expectation to destroy targets - I mean, even if they just used the MW as a yardstick and assumed that no intelligent alien forces were out there, they knew large alien animals could theoretically exist and presumably such predators would prefer the same environments that would make for a good outpost area. A stated part of the Pathfinders job is local threat pacification, after all. Even for passive obstacles like ice and rock, one would have assumed having a large, vehicle-scale weapon would have made for a preferable option over expecting the Pathfinder to try using explosives or turning back. It's not like Nomads were going to be standard-issue pack mules for all the outposts. 

I guess some of it is explained - in the case of the Arks being unarmed, there were severe political issues that needed to be navigated and I can buy the idea that the AI would have signed some agreement not to arm their dreadnought-sized private vessels in exchange for the Citadel Council dropping it's interference. The Arks did have some defensive options as they're seen to be carrying SX3 fighters. And the Pathfinder teams themselves did appear to be staffed by largely military or law enforcement veterans, so there's that.

The part I can't explain is why the AI effectively allowed the Pathfinder team to be armed up to the nines with the very best personal firepower in the MW (going so far as to acquire even N7, STG and Spectre-grade weaponry) but figured they would never, ever face anything larger than your average Krogan. It just doesn't make sense. There isn't even a tactical reason for their vehicles to be unarmed as the Nomad doesn't even need to deal with the weight restrictions that the Mako and Hammerhead did.

The ships are pretty easy. It's difficult to come up with a situation where one or two dreadnoughts were really going to make the difference for the AI. If you run into a civilization that's at technological parity with the MW but has just launched its first dreadnought, you're making a big difference. But what are the odds of that? A race at technological parity (or better!) will likely have enough ships to completely outclass any conceivable AI force for almost all of its existence. A more primitive race will be no threat to the Arks and the Nexus' fighter squadron anyway. The case where a couple of warships makes the difference would likely fail an ROI test even without political concerns.

As for armed vehicles, we should probably all just admit that the real reason is that vehicle combat failed the gameplay test. The in-universe reasons are epiphenomena.

This isn't really the way the Codex reads. The Treaty of Farixen establishes a ratio between dreadnought totals of the various races. There's only a hard cap if the turians either won't or can't afford to build more dreadnoughts

Peebee definitely got the bigger slice of the pie when it comes to romances, speaking as someone who romanced her and found it hard to not romance her.

Those Asari know how to seduce! 

Goddamn right.