Things that don't make sense (v2)

Too many unknowns. We don't know how long it took Ash and Kaidan to get back to the the ship with Shep from the beacon, we don't know how fast they flew, we don't know if they stayed in orbit of Eden prime for a while to make sure the geth attack was really over. My interpretation was that we don't really try to go to the Citadel until until Shepard wakes up.

Given that their seems to be a mass relay in the Utopia system that connects right to the Citadel, if they were going at best speed, it shouldn't take them more than a couple of minutes to get there.

But gothpunkboy is right, When you get right down to numbers, timelines never quite add up in BW games and ME of course also suffers from the general SciFi issue that travel times are always what the plot requires, always. I am currently re-watching the Star Trek TNG series and as much as I love that show, they hop back and forth from earth to the frontier in an instant if an episode requires it One episode, they are at earth, the next one (with almost the same star date), even sub space messages from the nearest Federation outpost takes 2 hours to reach the ship.

I mean, in the first scene of ME, we see the Normandy going from Earth to Charon at sub-FTL speed (because we see it fly by Jupiter and Neptune (I think), within the few seconds it takes Shepard to walk down the CIC to the bridge. Below FTL speed, that voyage should have take anything from a few hours to years. I suggest not getting too much into the nitty gritty on time lines too much. It'll only give you a headache.

You mean in that timeline on the Wiki page? That's just some Fan estimates for possibilities without any merit.
I mean, given that there is no canon as far as anything in the games is concerned and that you could do both LotSB and Arrival at any point after ME2's Horizon mission, stating any dates for any of those events is completely meaningless.

Is it? I don't think so because the dialogue is specific to what you did. The wiki is not.

Yea, those 4 years should probably be 3 years, unleass you assume that ME3 takes place over the course of more than an entire year (which is actually my head canon but I realize that that also doesn't entirely fit with some lines).

But what's wrong with the LotSB thing? If you don't have LotSB, Liara will remain on Illium until the player does their final save and imports it into ME3. To me, that last save signifies the time when Shep went/was brought back to earth. So if the player didn't do LotSB, that's kinda what she had to say.
So the timing of LotSB obviously depends on the player. If you do it right after Horizon she took over as SB probably some time 2185, if you do LotSB right before or after Arrival, she took over early 2186, if you didn't do it at all, she did it mid 2186 while you were in alliance lock-up after finishing with ME2.
I don't see a problem there.

I doubt it. How could there be? The game has no canon and you can do the missions in any order you like. There really can't be one single timeline for any of the events in the games (except possibly the prologues and finales but even for them, to the best of my knowladge, exact dates are never stated).

In fact, while I think the ME wiki is a great recourse normally, I am surprised they put this page up in that form.

Oh just btw, I am not saying that the ME games don't have some general issues with their time line. For example, armistice day happens twice in ME1 (once, Ash wants to have a drink with you and the second time is when Terra Firma protests in the wards). That doesn't work since ME1 starts in 2183, then Shepard is mentioned to have been absent from the Citadel for 2 years and change when meeting Avina in ME2 and that's 2185, so ME1 cannot have taken longer than a few months.

I never quite got that one either. But from what I remember, her argument goes like this: When the salarians and the krogan are in one room, the negotiations are going to fail no matter what. We, the asari, are super busy with the war and all, so we won't even spare one diplomat to send to your futile efforts at negotiating."

Ultimately, it was a dick move for the sake of the plot but their reason for not coming was exactly BECAUSE the dalatrass would be there. I guess the asari might have been afraid that if they showed up, they might have had to take a side in this dispute and they really wanted to stay out of it.

The asari kind of were punished for it when Thessia was hit super hard by the Reapers.  I felt like that was a direct consequence of their choosing to stay out.  Maybe krogan boots on Thessia would have made a difference.

Why did the asari councilor try to stop Udina? It didn't help that she said nothing.  Did she do that so Udina would get shot? Most likely. Bioware demanded there be another death. An unnecessary death.

Knowing that the MET timeline falls to pieces the moment you look at it, I do my best to ignore any in-game reference to dates or the passage of time, yet for some reason Tali telling me in ME3 that it's been "three years to the day" since her dust-up with Saren's agents just grinds my gears.

Why did they write that line? Why was it necessary to be so specific? They must know that the timeline has issues. I would think they'd want to avoid drawing attention to it. Or do they seriously mean to suggest that the events of ME1, ME2 and ME3-up-to-that-point took place within a 5-6 month period? Or do the writers just not understand math? Or are galactic years measured differently? Why would an Earth year be a standard unit of measurement, anyway? What does a "year" mean to Tali? Why can't I stop thinking about this?

While this is a nice sentiment, the ME Codex specifically tells us that FTL travel in the ME universe does not introduce notable relativistic effects that one might expect. Effectively, the Mass Effect field around the ship changes the value of the speed of light c, so in the frame of reference which the crew is occupying, the ship never actually travels more than a tiny fraction of the speed of light, thus avoiding any time dilation. It is only from the outside of the field that the ship (and crew) are traveling at FTL.

If you travel at, say 0.01 times c, you wouldn't experience any time dilation effects. That is what the crew of the Normandy does, Only, within the ME field, c is increased by, say a factor of 10.000. So observed from the outside, the ship travels at 0.01 x 10.000 x c = 100 x c, so they would travel at 100 times the speed of light. But from the point of reference of the crew, they still travel at only 0.01 x c so they experience time just like the observer on the outside does, they are just living in a "faster universe" for a while, if you will.