There SHOULD be a way to board the Tempest WITHOUT leaving the planet in the process

Why do we even need to hop on the ship. We can do all that kind of stuff today on our smartphones, you are telling me i cannot do that on my omnitool 800 years from now. I mean whats the point of having a QEC connection with an AI which is linked to my ship, in my head?

In ME1 you could board your ship without leaving. Since then the game has always made you leave. I agree that this should be something you can do on your omni tool, you should not even need a forward station for it.

Another thing is that I should not have to read any email or go to the vid meeting room if the person is in front of me. On at least 2 occasions in this game you need to talk to Reyes and Addison on the vidcon but if they are infront of you you can't have the conversation face to face. Or I can't call them on my Omni tool. Maybe phone technology will not exist in the future?

If Addison is in front of me in Ops on the nexus but I have to talk to her on vidcon in the tempest meeting room. I have to:
1- Go to Docking Bay (Load screen and time sink)
2- Board the tempest (Load screen/departture animation and second time sink)
3- Walk to meeting room and access vidcon

This is insane. Once the euphoria of playing a new ME game after a 5 year wait expires, you begin to realize how annoying the game is.

I'm just imagining how that can happen in real life

Ryder: Hey Kallo just coming in to check some emails before I hop off again

Kallo: Getting ready for take off.

Exactly this. Making AVP and APEX available from forward stations would be the most sensible way to do this. Hell, it could even be made a requirement to have all forward stations deployed. I could live with that.

The reason behind the taking off is that they don't have any of those planet-side fancy views for the fancy cabin and the bridge, and they can't show you the blank windows. Turning on some kind of 'windows blinds' could have been an option, but that would require some redources too. So, now we have to take off in order to have a cup of coffee (or visit WC. )

But I do wonder how well a do-everything omni-tool would actually work in practice though. Like, would it be something we access through the start menu and have a "cutscene" anywhere we're standing? Would we have both the option of using the omni-tool or the vidcomm in the conference room? There is one instance when there's a vidcall done over omni-tool, and that's when Alec Ryder contacts the Pathfinder team on Habitat 7, just like when Wrex contacts Shepard on Sur'Kesh when Cerberus attacks. I don't think it's so much that they forgot, but rather that this sort of thing might be messy to implement as a proper game mechanic and just left it to dedicated points for communication, which is what ME's kind of always done anyway.

The Initiative has Verizon.

Putting aside any practical benefits of being able to board and disembark the Tempest wherever we land, like AVP and such, I just really like the optics of the whole thing. I loved how in ME1, you were doing stuff on the Normandy, but if you went to the bridge, you could clearly see that we were still docked on Feros or Noveria. I would've loved if, say you were landed, Suvi and Kallo weren't just sitting there since there's not much reason for them to until it's time to go. Of course it doesn't need to be all that, but just seeing the location out the window would suit me fine.

I think it got axed due to lack of development time. It's strange that there's an airlock with a loadout module for no apparent reason. I think it was supposed to be in the game at some point.

One thing we learned in ME3 Citadel DLC is preflight checks can take up to 30 mins so there should be plenty of time to check email, strike teams, AVP, chat with crew, a little R&D and still have enough time to run back into Kadara to buy that weapon mod you keep forgetting about buying. On a serious note I don't see why the loading screen for the ship should take that long and I hope that is something they can really work to improve if there is to be another ME game.

Different people have different playing rhythms. I imagine the devs all played the game in a way where this isn't much of an issue (though I suspect the Addison thing would bug anyone). Same thing in DAI, where a air number of players were annoyed by the war table -- though some of that has to do with people wanting instant gratification.