[SPOILERS] My (long) Andromeda final review

Stop lying.

Or rather, stop with the hysterical overstatement.

Ok then, show a video of companions killing an ascendant. On their own.

And it has to be in less than 5 seconds, because that's how long it would take for me to take it down using companions' powers on MET.  

Companions just about never take out top tier enemies on their own, because their power and weapon damage tends to be less than the PC's by a noticeable margin. When was the last time you've seen any MET companion take on a brute or banshee that you didn't end up finishing off yourself? They'd never finish off an ascendant on their own because of the immunity and orb mechanic, and since we don't have nifty cobra RPG's in ME3SP, we can actually finish them off faster here with simple consumables. 

In any case, after 3 full runs here, I've seen the companions in MEA do a bang up job on crowd control, which is really the bulk of what I want out of them in the first place, especially companions like Drack and Vetra who steal my kills. There's a simple pleasure in watching Drack run up from behind with a krogan hammer. I didn't even know he used that the first time. 

stuff 

Now obviously I could have paused and micromanaged them like a puppeteer to come aid me, but that would break the flow of combat and stop my roleplay illusion of them being independent characters.

I do miss having control of my squaddies' powers, but these questions overlook an important fact. In MEA, we are granted ridulously swift individual cooldowns for all of our powers. The ability to setup our own instantaneous combos was substituted for the ability to do so in concert with our companions. I'm not saying that one or the other is better, but only that they are two ways of accomplishing the same thing. (Having both rapid, individual cooldowns and precise control of squaddie power usage would be brokenly powerful, of course.)

To use your earlier example, I'm not certain that I could kill an Ascendant any more quickly with squad combos on demand. I can already kill them in mere seconds on my own (playing Insanity of course). The lengthiest part is destroying the orb, and that thing melts under Incendiary Ammo. I killed and Ascendant in seconds earlier today with Tactical Cloak + Turbocharge + Autofire N7 Valkyrie + Incendiary Ammo. I dropped the orb in 5-6 seconds and then melted the kett's face with the above. It died almost instantly.

The current setup isn't weaker; it's just different. I can definitely understand preferring one or the other. I miss precise squaddie commands, too. It felt more like a team game, to me. I do enjoy the powerful feeling of the current setup, though. I thought I'd hate the new setup, but it's not bad.

Now, seriously, that's an excuse for being lazy. Even in DA2 you could at least choose the characters' weapons. It's the first Bioware game where you can't customize anything about your companions. 

Ok then, show a video of companions killing an ascendant. On their own.

And it has to be in less than 5 seconds, because that's how long it would take for me to take it down using companions' powers on MET.  

You don't need to pause, you can assign their powers and use them like you're using your own. You PC users have even more slots available for this. On console I have 3 powers for myself and 1 button for each squadmate, and even then it's still more efficient than what MEA did with their random squadmate power use.

I guess that's where the general problem lies though. People who liked to play more efficiently and tactically in the MET instead of more or less trying to solo stuff are just screwed in MEA, and there's no denying that. Whether people enjoy to let their squadmates run around randomly or not doesn't change the fact that playing with squadmate orders so they use their powers whenever the player wants is more efficient than MEA squaddies can ever be. MEA combat has been dumbed down from the trilogy and it plays more like MP without having decent real life people playing with you.

What level are you talking about? When I played on Normal -- I always play a joke difficulty my first time so I can blow through the combat -- it took more hits than that. Incinerate + Fire combo detonation from Concussive Shot or whatever + weapons fire from all three squadmates still won't get more than a third or so of the ascendant's health bar gone before the barrier goes back up.