I personally never understood why some people think ME2 was off point about fighting the reapers.

What burningcherry said.

To elaborate a little:



At the end of ME1, Shepard specifically mentions what s/he plans to do in ME2. "Find a way to stop them!"
Then, at the beginning of ME2, they are hunting Geth for some reason and the authors chose to reset everything from there. Because ME2 went off on the Collector/Cerberus tangent then, a LOT of things had to be crammed into ME3 without any foreshadowing even happening. If there had been time to develop actual plot points like the crucible properly, maybe it wouldn't have felt quite as ridiculous as it did.

A very nice article summarising how badly ME1's potential was squandered in ME2 can be found here by the way.
Even after all these years, I still cry one single tear every time I read this.

This article has amazing points and justifies its simply stated conclusion perfectly. But I feel that I have to add in one more thing it doesn't eleborate on: the Collectors. They're hiding. And they have amazing technology, which they occasionally share with others. Shepard trying to convince them that the Reapers exist and get them to cooperate with the rest of the galaxy and share their knowledge would make a nice story, even if not filled with action. Instead, they were retconned into another type of Reaper pawns, just as with what happened to Cerberus in ME3.
The bolded part wasn't a boundary conditon for ME2 but happened in ME2. Everything that depends on it is ME2 dealing with the problems it created itself.

Funny how the filler game is the best one.

There could have been a few tweaks to the story to try and cut down on some angst. Not that you can eliminate it all because you will always have some that won't be happy if a future title doesn't do exactly what they imagined it would do.

It is fairly believable that the council isn't really going to worry about the Reapers after ME1, and more specifically two years later when the bulk of ME2 is set. They were never really inclined to believe Shepard in ME1.

Why they are not is tied to the same problem you have with sending a spec ops soldier off to investigate the Reapers for another game. The entire Reaper trap hinges on there being nearly no evidence that they exist. Where do you plan to send Shepard in this imaginary game? To find something heretofore undiscovered that he stumbles on based on his Shepard sense? Is he going to fall back on his time as a detective-archeologist-stripper-scientist? Wait, that's Liara. I guess he could haul her around for another game.

Pockets of heretic geth resistance in the beginning of ME2 is logical, and may really have even been the best slim lead Shepard would have had to investigate the Reapers anyway since they were a known link. Nevermind that the Alliance could still request or order him to go and he would.

What follows from that within the story is also fairly logical. I suppose some would have been happier if Shepard could tell TIM to shove it at the beginning, then proceed to the Council and be told they don't believe him. Then they could spend the rest of the game trying to fly around the galaxy with no support, no ship, no crew and no money.

I agree that ME1 built the Reapers up to be basically unbeatable. Which is the real reason there was always going to have to be some magical device. That is of course assuming the end was going to be our victory rather than Reaper victory. You would not find a plausible way to beat them in any imaginary ME2 game that doesn't seriously retcon the strength of the Reapers.

Again, Sovereign is not proof of some Reaper armada in dark space. You aren't thinking about this in the most basic, logical terms. What actual EVIDENCE do you have other than statements that the Reaper fleet exists? Sovereign is a relic. It might be the only one. Now there is an important piece of evidence that you do have; Sovereign was able to give Saren access to the Citadel itself and Sovereign was intent on docking to the station. Why? What did it want to do?

If the sequel had been written better the aftermath of the geth attack would have been examined from this angle. If I were Shepard this is how I'd put it to the Council,

"Look, Sovereign was trying to manipulate the Citadel in some fashion. How? Why? If we can determine that the Citadel really IS a mass relay then we'll have some way of verifying the Prothean Vision and statements by Saren, VIGIL, and Sovereign itself."

You'd THINK that the Council would now want to understand, and to control, their own base of operations. Surely they'd no longer be willing to just entrust the Keepers do it.

That's like saying "I know there's a tsunami on the way, but maybe it'll pass by. And it hasn't hit anyway so no need to worry." The Council are idiots no matter how you look at it. I can't see how they can be trusted to run the galaxy. It's one reason why choosing Anderson is best because he's the only person who ever believes Shepard.

The Council didn't have to actually be in denial about the Reapers. They still could have, and should have, seen Sovereign's attack as at least a actively hostile Geth attack, and used it as a pretext for an arms race. The Geth threat is now aggressively real, even if the Reapers may not be, and if the Reapers turn out to be real after all than at least they built up weapons for them. And an arms race could've lead to tensions and conflicts both within the Citadel nations and with the Terminus Systems, which could've been the storyline for Shepard to do instead of the superfluous Collectors. 

To be honest, I don’t buy them not doing anything. After all Shepard was with Cerberus, a terrorist organization that is against alien races. Why should they tell Shepard anything? Even Anderson kept secrets from us during that time. Also if the races didn’t do anything, that’s more on the race leadership than the Council since they are just representatives who aren’t in the know about everything.