So...why was squadmate control taken away from us?

Hard to say... I would also go with the "they wont design 2 different combat systems for SP and MP" as jackdaniel mentioned.
On top of that I think, as they want combat to be more fluent and fast paced, pausing it to give your squad orders would be just contradictory to this goal. In this fast paced combat we have now, it is already hard to give "move there" and "attack this target" commands and imagine power selecting without combat wheel + pause.
One of the reasons why I am not enjoying MEA combat, some 3rd person action combat is fine, if I can pause, look around, assess the situation and give proper orders to the team, but this "full shooter experience" is just not for me, if I wanted that, I would play MP or another game. In conclusion, MEA moved from RPG to shooter even more then before. (I watched a vid the other day, can not remember whether it was Battlefield or COD or maybe something else... they had dialogues there too, and could actualy choose what to say, but it was meaningless, just an illusionary decision... MEA feels, somehow, the same, I do make decisions in conversations, 4 options, but the outcome is always the same. Meaningless.)

You know, the beauty of the OT was that if you did not want to use tactical pause, YOU DID NOT HAVE TO. Squad powers were hotkeyable, and if you did not feel like bothering with setting up combos either, there was an option for their AI to use all powers/only defense powers in combat.

Like many other things from the OT, tactical pause combat that many of us loved is gone now. Was it appeasing the multiplayer/shooter crowd? Was it dumbing down the game aka "streamlining" choice? Was it deemed too complex to code with profiles switching and power interaction? I think we will never know.

I also think Andromeda axed too many things that made Mass Effect the games we loved, tactical combat being just one of them.

Not sure, but it better return in the sequel. Overall I just didn't like the fact that they removed almost all the options from us to really use our squad.

Can't give them orders in combat.

Can't change their outfits at all.

Can't give them better guns. (What was the point to adding so many weapons and not having the option to give some of those sweet new weapons to our team?)

Can not tell them to switch up weapons when the time comes for it.(love going all shotgun crew in the other games, especially when the combat was going to be close quarters)

Also I wish there were more options to spec your team the way you wanted. There leveling up was just too simple.

I'm of the school of thought that if you should never need to revive your character or squadmates, because they should never fall.

If they do, roll back to the last save and start the fight again, however many times it takes to complete it without any KO's.

(What can I say, I enjoy torturing challenging myself?!)

As I said in my review, I suggested the team, going forward, let us button-map our squad-mates Primers or Detonators. Countless times I wanted to use Drack's Incinerate to Detonate a combo I set up. In the OT, you could control your squad better and make combos happen more reliably, which made your squadmates feel like they were contributing more, instead of randomly doing it here in Andromeda.

Back playing ME1 and it's so refreshing to be able to mess about with my squads load-out and order them around. If not for the graphics you would think ME1 the new game. MEA, one giant step backwards.

The reason why it was axed it really simple, people complained about "the awesome button" so BioWare did their best to prevent the one button that does everything while adding jump which "any real modern game has jumping in it, BioWare is just lazy not to have jumping in their games by now".

So they ran out of buttons on the controllers, combine that with wanting to make combat "modern" because people were wanting that as well and you get what we got.

The real lesson is if you like something about the game make sure you talk about it otherwise BioWare will axe it to try and appease the vocal groups.

I don't recall anybody complaining about that, and people always have something to complain about.