Mike Gamble is now Project Director at BioWare - What could he be in charge of?

Hmmmmm, one thing is that time is not really as much of an issue for the reapers as it is for us.

They can't just travel there via FTL because of drive discharge but they could basically have launched a relay out there with non FTL (say at 0.1c or something) and then, say 100.000 years later, after the thing is 10.000ly down the road into dark space, they could connect to it and get there.

At least before Arrival, that was always my head canon as to how they set themselves up in dark space in the first place.

Of course, that does not in any way solve the problem that having a setup like this with just one sentinel in the MW and no backup plan would be entirely stupid.

To enable constant harvesting of the separate relay systems.  The salarians discovered the Citadel in 520 BCE, meaning that it took roughly 2700 years of development after that point for the civilizations in the ME1 gameworld to be consided "ready to harvest" by the Reapers.  Furthermore, it takes another 1,000 years to complete a single harvest.  That means that if there was only one Citadel, there would be 3,000 to 4,000 years where there would be no Citadel available in any individual Relay layer to be discovered.  If, say, there were even just 3 or 4, then harvests could be continuous, provided there are 50,000 relay layers in the entire galaxy, instead one new capital reaper being made every 50,000 years, we could get 50,000 of them being made every 50,000 years (1 for every 1,000-year harvest.  Instead of a 50,000-year dormant state (totally inefficient use of a machine culture), there would be constant "production" with a big proviso.

Which is - Provided that civilization could rise to "ready" status every 50,000 years in every Relay layer... which is the "fly in the lotion."  To allow for a 200,000-year development cycle for each civilization, there would have to be many more "younger civilizations" at various points in their300,000-year evolution that are left alone during each harvest (i.e. any civilizations not within 50,000 years of becoming advanced enough to consider harvesting... Which is a flaw in the notion of the Yahg and the Vorcha not being harvested during ME's cycle,  since they are clearly well out of the Stone Age that the humans would have been in when the Protheans were being harvested.  That is, both of those civilizations are going to be ready to be harvested long before the game tells use the Reapers will return to harvest them.

No, I'm arguing that the premise even as it is presented in ME1 is deeply flawed.  I believe others here have already been suggesting that the Reapers are stupid.

The subsequent games try to account for the discrepancies in the Reaper premise, but wind up really only making matters worse.  Instead of a huge, open-space galaxy, we have an inadequate one that is mysteriously "walled off" from the remaining 99.99999% of it despite having outposts in all quadrants of it.  We have machines that are said to deliberately head off to do nothing for 50,000 years at a time, leaving a single sentry to enable their return after all that hiatus.  It makes no sense.  Furthermore, the timelines make no sense.  That Sovereign would tell Shepard that the Reapers are legion when that doesn't appear to be possible given the timeline as represented in ME1... makes no sense.

I don't believe it was just ME3's endings thate "ruined" the Milky Way galaxy.  The galactic mess started right with ME1.

I never got the impression in game that the Reapers were capable of manipulating the time frame by speeding up the evolution of any of the species.  The impression I got is that they just planted the Citadel in a position where it would eventually be discovered once the civilizations, one their own, developed space travel.  If they were capable of fast tracking the evolution of organics, than why not just grow continuous crops in a single planet?

Then there's the confusing conundrum introduced in ME3 that describes them as searching the cosmos for an answe to the organic/synthetic issuer.  It's hard to search for an answer when you're manipulating development.  If the organics are only being allowed to develop along the lines desired by the Reapers and that development track is always the same, then the Reapers can't expect a unique and different solution to emerge.  (Definition of insanity, if they do expect a different result from performing the same experiment over and over again.)  So, this opens the question of whether each "Relay layer" in the galaxy is being manipulated in a different way... each a inuqie experiment series.  In fact, not every "Relay layer" would necessarily rely on mass relays.  That is, different tech = different experimental parameters.

This could then tie in what was happening in Andromeda to a Reaper issue.  The kett/remnant being part of a different Reaper-made petri dish... one that has now become contaminated by the contents of the MEU petri dish (ie. humans, salarians, asari and turians).

What about Quantum Entanglement? Through spooky action at a distance, creating a Mass Relay in the MW galaxy, also creates another one, somewhere in  Dark Space. Basically, there is a number of Mass Relays, mirroring the ones in the MW, but the Reapers simply hibernated to the closest one linking to the Citadel and waited for the Keepers to activate the Citadel relay, and with Sovereign being left behind as their backup plan and the Collectors being plan C. When plan B failed, though, they also started moving to the next relay, which we blew up in Arrival. However, since they were in mid transit, they were left stranded in space, but still a lot closer than before, which is why they so inconspicuously infiltrated the Milky Way, at first, indoctrinating the Batarian hegemony and from there, starting a Blitzkrieg throughout the many other star systems.

Am I making sense? I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't.