Time to lay down arms?

yeah I unintentionally upset someone once with a joke on a forum that I was a member of or at least I meant it as a joke but didn't realise that it was offensive until later but when I did I did apologize for it. I usually at least try to keep things civil if I can even if I disagree  with another poster. i learned from the mistake and moved on. Others should try to as well.

You used the wrong word - it wasn't filler, it was just pointless and plotless. All it did was establish some character development and possibly some world building with some tacked on collector bullshit at the end. In a plot driven story spending a third of the time on shit which doesn't advance the over arching plot is laughably bad and will lead to many problems in the future (like the ending of ME3 needing to be insanely rushed, tacked on, deus ex machina twaddle.)

Character and world development should be fit into scenes that advance the story as a whole. The whole of ME2 was a glorified recruitment drive and the concept basically should have been scrapped early on.

I think the issue is more that ME3 never built off of the reason why Harbinger was so keen to build another Reaper to open the Citadel Relay. There was no negative for his plan failing for the Reapers but they should've made it clear that the trip across the vastness of the galactic void weakened them in some way. That would've made Harbinger's plan make more sense.

Opening the Citadel Relay is the only logical reason for Harbinger to create a new Reaper, as opening that allows the Reapers to bypass the Prothean locks, sever the Relay network and the hub of galactic politics, allowing the Reapers to do what they normally do which is cull each star system. There isn't any other reason to do it, and once you defeat the human Reaper the Reapers wake up and travel to the Milky Way via FTL. The Human Reaper was their ticket to avoiding the trip across Dark Space via FTL.

Also, the Alpha Relay didn't connect to Dark Space, it was the primary relay that they would reach the soonest that would've granted them access to the galaxy at large. The reason it needed to be destroyed is to allow the galaxy more time to prepare for their arrival at the next closest Relay which turned out to be in Kite's Nest.

Alas, poor Dextro, I knew thee... not that well, really.

Except it made zero sense to send the Collectors off gathering humans in secret rather than waiting a couple of years for the tens of thousands of Reapers to "darken the sky of every world" and start harvesting then.

All Harbinger did was tip his hand (tentacle?) too early, and deprived himself of a weapon.

Exactly

Since shepard showed up but he/she were the only ones who did.

"This isn't about strategy or tactics. This is about survival."

It's a line made all the worse by the fact that it's uttered by a soldier. 

I mean, I think I get what they were going for with it. Shepard is asked how they can stop the Reapers and I think Shepard is saying that they may not be able to stop the Reapers and that it may be about just surviving the Reapers. The line, however, fails even in that context for the obvious reason that it's pretty much impossible to even consider how to survive without resorting to strategies and tactics. This isn't a situation where blind instinct would work.

The line is just nonsensical. Now that I think about it, it is actually very reflective of what I think is one of Mass Effect's reoccurring problems: it works until you think about it for just a moment. I think it can be phrased as relying on you to be so caught up in the feeling of the situation you're in that you don't notice what it is actually about or what is being said.

One of the things Mass Effect does very well is keep the player in the moment but I felt it began to rely too much on it and worse, began to not properly build the emotional investment that would allow for it to work.

For example, it kept emphasizing a connection with Earth that I felt ultimately failed because Earth had never been visited in the trilogy prior to Mass Effect 3. Contrast that with the Citadel which served as a central hub throughout the entire trilogy. Not only has the players visited it in each game but they've had the opportunity to explore it, learn about it and see in what ways events had affected it. They also met people who lived there and important events have taken place there. Shepard becoming a Spectre, the showdown with Sovereign, loyalty missions and so on. 

At least Shepard got a complete trilogy, I mean.