Dat moment when you meet custom Dad Ryder...

Sadly Ellen does not change. I am Asian in my current playthrough and she is still the same.

I really do understand what you are saying and I do wish the execution was better. Character Creation for MEA is by far one of the most disappointing and limiting features for the game, which is a bit surprising for a BioWare game. If there was a mistake (Preset 9 Sara really doesn't look very Caucasian to me but not African either), it will be something BioWare addresses in the next two months or BioWare would have already made a remark about it being a mistake. You'd think if it merely was a mismatch, however, that it would be a quick and easy fix.

My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that Alec's likeness will always be based off Scott and Ellen's likeness will always be based off of Sara. I believe that's how BioWare approached the likeness of the parents, and if that's the case you'll likely never be able to change how Alec looks, unless BioWare just allows folks to pick a preset appearance for Alec.

My non default Alec is hot af imo

Funny thing is, I used the ugliest female Ryder because I figured not many would chose her, so I could pretend to myself she was unique.

I wish I'd taken a screenshot of his face, but here is my female Ryder:

That's my Ryder!Dad and the only thing in common is the female Ryder (I customized both male and female before playing).

But as far as I'm concerned, it was not worth limiting the character creator for someone who has like..what...less than 5minutes of screen time? Not to mention every custom Ryder!Dad looks totally wonky.

Yes, this was disappointing - my first playthrough I played a customized white male character, and she looked quite believable as mother. Started my second playhrough recently, going for a completely different kind of character, and created a very dark skinned black female. There's NO WAY she could be her mother. I could only head-cannon it so that the children were from their father's previous marriage; maybe his first wife died when the children were very young, and Alec met Ellen shortly after, so she's the only mother they've ever known.

But that's just lazy. Even Dragon age II, which cut corners everywhere and was on a way too tight development schedule, managed to give you a family that resembled your customized character fairly decently.

Both my Ryders are preset 4 too and I got the same Alec. All three are Asian, so I don't see the problem. Other than this Alec being not very handsome. But all except the default look meh tbh.

And mommy Ryder is not Asian.
I would be totally cool with that because my Scott looks like he's got Caucasian mixed in anyway. He's got blue eyes. Sara's eyes are purple.
Problem is Alec's eyes are based on Scott. So both of them have blue eyes. Aaaand their goes my head canon that Scott got his eye color from his mom.... *sigh*

Yeah I wouldn't be bothered much at all by the family resemblance issues if they didn't restrict the CC for it.

Looks like it's not working any better than it did in DA2 where we got a full CC at least.
THAT is the really frustrating thing, I agree.

So much in this game is good idea/bad implementation.

Should have said based on the protagonist sibling then. Unless yours is Scott too?

It seems no matter what, this is what happens:

Your preset Sara will always have an Alec that matches the preset Scott that goes with your Sara (preset 5 Sara will have a preset 5 Alec that looks like preset 5 Scott, but a preset 7 Scott will not change Alec unless Scott is your PC), and your Sara's eye-color will match Alec's eyes.

Dad came out great compared to mine. My Dad looked like he was from west Africa. I thought, hmm... how did Bioware come to that conclusion? I meet Mom and I'm still figuring out how Bioware came up with the conclusion. I was adopted. 

I'm glad that My Ryder's dad turned out to be his blological dad