ME3 sequel

Clear copycat, but they should have pulled a Voyager on this one. Hell, they still could, but they need to move away from Kett/Angara/current setting. Happens few years laters ( no more kids cracking jokes) keep the Ryders/crew, don't like the idea of next ME bailing out like this.
Small ship stranded in hostile, unknown territory, crew of about a few dozen people, it would make resource gathering actually relevant to survival, you'd have to upgrade your ship in different ways, whole what-happens-when-you-take-away-authority thing, dynamics of chaotic social structure. etc.
MEA had characters with good backgrounds, but writers didn't have balls to go trough with it...what if you were dismissive of Cora and she actually tried to stage a mutiny? Despite it's issues, DA II tried to do something more with npc/player dynamic than any other BW game.
Generation ship, basically...there is actually an upcoming rpg on this, worth checking out: irontowerstudio.com/new-world-features

Would it matter? If someone's signing my paycheck, I don't have to care if the business plan is a good one.

Mass relays are a shortcut. It could take years to get to your destination using FTL, but mass relays are instant travel.

But it does cover it, since FTL is an umbrella term and there is no such thing as the FTL drive (in fact, there is no such thing as an FTL drive at all but let's pretend).

So every warp drive is an FTL drive but not all FTL drives are warp drives...

 True, but irrelevant.  If the game doesn't have mass relays, then there won't be any destination in the game which is so many light-years away that you'd need a relay to get there.

Mass relays don't matter. 

The scale of the setting does not dictate how much story content you can get or how many characters you can involve. But that aside, a star cluster is immense. You can create plenty of locations/hubs, factions, etc. to populate this area. Nothing but what the writers care or don't care to include limits how much there is to do in any given space. A story could take place in a single solar system, and still somehow have more to do than the entirety of the MET. 

100K individuals don't matter either.

You'll never interact with even a 10th of them, and it only takes a handful at any given time to really fill a story with a sizable cast. 

As I heard one scientist, who was talking about how scientists often put it, put it: "Not being allowed to go FTL in physics is not only a good idea, it's the law!"

But then I didn't address that matter any more than I did the subject of relays making a difference or not. I merely addressed FTL drive ≠ Warp drive...

Ehhhhhhhh. The laws of physics are subject to change. Plus, I've stated this multiple times, not necessarily on here, if you aren't going FTL, or at the very least using something like wormholes, then it simply takes far too long to get anywhere in the universe fast enough. (I'm referring to the scientists when I say this)
I also remember in the past how, because of the experiments done by the folks at Eagleworks (Warp-field interferometer & EM drive experiments), internet articles were constantly thinking that the "Warp Drive" was an EM drive. This pissed me off because the EMdrive is a controversial type of thruster while the warp drive, or the alcubierre drive, is a theoretically possible solution to Einstein's equations for apparent-FTL travel, so basically the internet news sources took both experiments, mixed them up, and just ran with it. Plus both were pretty small experiments, Harold White even said that the warp-field interferometer was a "Humble experiment". Then again, that's internet journalism. 
(Soapbox over)

Leviathan, discovering more Prothean pods, cured Krogan problems, maskless Quarian, exploring Palaven. Throughout my playthroughs of Andromeda I had to keep telling myself "this shit makes absolutely no sense but they're rebooting the series so let it slide." This made it a pretty fun game. But now that the series is on hold, I recommend them going back to the Milky Way. I'd rather the series continue after ME3 

Sorry about that.

This isn't a job. It's giving up everything and putting your life in the hands of people who spout gibberish. I'd be willing to handwave this if the game was good in evey other way. But it's not.
Anyway, the whole operation is more a cult than an initiative. For an endeavour such as this you wouldn't need the best of the best but the best of the best of the best. Without a compelling reason why would anyone half-decent sign up? You'd end up with idiots like Liam... dammit.
Forget everything I just wrote! The Initiative makes perfect sense!