What did you expect?

Inevitable in retrospect.

Back then I was worried about the lack of gameplay. People on here used the excuse that Bioware didn't want to reveal much and wanted to surprise us.

They sure surprised us.

Hi Dutch.

It seems that Marauder Shields was trying to warn us about this too. It's a pity that I did not heed him.

There were gameplay videos though, it was videos on everything else that was lacking. The Peebee mission and gameplay series videos were definitely before EA access.

For the sake of "contribution," the game should have been delayed until it was in a passable state for release. There's strong evidence to suggest most of the game was made in the last year and a half of development. It is unreasonable to believe any studio, in such a short amount of time, can deliver a game so ambitious and with little to no issues in that time frame.

It was an absolute disaster waiting to happen, and the blame goes with the BioWare leadership. I don't know who's call it was to release the game in the state that it was, but it may have doomed the franchise's future. At the very least, it's assured we won't be seeing anything Mass Effect-related for a very long time.

I think it was likely EA higher-ups that made that awful decision, not BW folks

EA may have been the ones to force BioWare to ultimately release the game (they do have to make a certain amount of money every fiscal year), but you also have to realize the game had been in development hell for five years and was even delayed six months. EA gave BioWare every opportunity in the world to do something with this game. Andromeda had a longer development cycle than any previous BioWare game. It's easy to blame the publisher, but this one falls to BioWare. They didn't have proper guidance and they released a product not ready to be shipped.

It's dead, Jim.

No, the BW folks screwed up by wasting too much time and too many resources early on. 
But sometimes your team/employee screws up; that doesn't mean you release the product before it's ready and say "Oh well." It's not life or death (like a car or something), but it's still kind of a Fuck You to your consumer, especially those who pre-ordered because they love the franchise so much. This is why people were worried about BW being subsumed into a behemoth corp like EA. They sell us an unfinished product for a game that was hyped to hell, and we're just supposed to be cool with it because the "fiscal quarter." Hey, they gotta eat, too buy their spot on the space station with all the other obscenely rich people before the nukes make Earth unhabitable  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Too bad BW can't work on a game until it's basically perfect, like CDPR can, so that major setbacks don't unexpectedly ruin not only a much-anticipated game, but also potentially a whole franchise. I won't be pre-ordering EA games anymore, that's for sure. 

Hi, Dutch^TM.

How are things in Kekistan?