What are your too ***SPICY*** to handle hot takes of the trilogy?

The Collectors have been targeting isolated small human colonies out in the lawless section of space.  Purposefully far away from the Alliance or Council beyond their reach or jurisdiction. These are literal small homestead were all they have is what ever guns they have on hand and what ever self created government they agreed to make.  If the Alliance is a 30 year old in their prime then these colonies are 1 year olds. They only have a couple hundred to maybe low thousand people to start with. No major manufacturing base. They are not strategic locations with stock plies of supplies because they are not associated with the Alliance.  You could Thanos snap them out of existence and  the Alliance would remain at 100% capability. Or to be generous go from 100% to 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999%


How does creating a new Reaper help anything? The Citadel is still closed off to the Reapers.  The various races of the galaxy are slowly reverse engineering the tech from Sovereign amplifying their abilities. As well as rebuilding their fleets. The Geth Heretics have been decimated and being hunted down by every race capable of space flight.  Any incursions into Alliance Territory would be met by Alliance Fleets with at least token support from Turian, Salarian and Asari Fleets given this would be an unknown enemy that tries to kidnap entire planets. They would be decimated because the only straight up fight the SR-2 a heavy Frigate with upgraded Thanix canons that ups it's combat ability into Cruiser level fire power is able to decimate a Collector Cruiser easily.  The only other fight was a single frigate caught unaware and alone with no support near by. 

A single captured Collector ship would allow them to revers engineer the IFF they use to access the Omega Relay. Instead of a single ship with a handful of people it would be multiple ships with entire battalions assaulting the Collector base.   Even if this drained some military forces and reduced the various races from 100% strentht to 75% strength. It doesn't matter because ME1 already made it crystal clear that you can not beat the Reapers in conventional warfare.  At 100% or 50% all it would mean is a slight different to how long it would take before the Reapers won.  Like dragging out a checker match by moving your one piece back and forth across the board to avoid it being taken but no real chance to actually take any of the other person's pieces.

In fact the one known example of Collector attack on an actual Alliance strong point with James Vega was the direct result of a Cerberus operative purposefully attracting them and sabotaging all efforts to stop them in the name of collecting data on their tech, methods and actions.

Your Star Wars example isn't quite the same as each movie is fairly stand alone. There was no build up to a massive Imperial invasion that the Rebel Alliance would have to deal with. This is why I used Lord of the Rings because it is a better comparison. As it goes out of the way to explicitly state how Sauron is preparing to attack all the free people of Middle Earth. And it shows how the actions of Two Towers has effects in then next book.  Thane making up with his son isn't the same level as Eowyn slaying the Witch King.


With Mass Effect you could play ME1 and jump right into ME3 and have pretty much the same idea of what is happening. If you jump from Fellowship to Return you would be very lost and have no idea what is going on.