Reasonable points, but as you can see in game, even FTL travel allows you access to a number of systems each with numerous planets. The Krogan are a hardy race. They've lived for quite a long time as the Galactic equivalent of Cuba, and I doubt they'd suddenly die out once they're limited to their surrounding systems.
Except garden worlds are rare, and few if any of the homeworlds are within FTL range of one. For that matter, all the known garden worlds were colonized, which means the Reapers razed them just like Earth; there's nothing there to use.
Finally, we are talking about a post-scarcity universe here. You suspense your disbelief long enough to accept galaxy spanning civilizations, but you can't accept the fact that they can synthesize dextros food? Ridiculous.
Uh, no, it's not even close to post-scarcity. Do you actually know what that means? Goods still need time and effort-consuming labor and resources (gathered through labor and with an investment of resources) to be produced and moved. In ME2, you can ask the Citadel tour-guide VI why there are so many poor people around, and it tells you that
poverty can't be solved without cornucopia technology. The quarians need ships dedicated to hydroponics to feed themselves. One look at Omega or Illium should be all you need.
This is not post-scarcity. Star Trek is post-scarcity, where matter replication on both a personal and industrial scale is not only easy but useable by everyone, and energy technology is efficient enough to produce a vast surplus. (This is also why the argument that the Federation is some sort of saccharine, communist hell is ridiculous, but that's another debate.)
Aside from that, as everyone has been saying,
this is not the problem. Can I easily believe that the quarian liveships are sufficient to feed the quarian and turian forces stranded at earth? Yes, it's not a hard conclusion to draw. I can also believe that if I got the quarians killed, the turians will starve instead.
The problem is we are not
shown these things. It is
bad writing to expect your audience to find their answers in fanfiction.
I don't know what kind of ending you'd be satisfied with if you expect the writers to spell out the evolution for every race for the next century.
I don't need the next century for every species spelled out, I need the obvious, blatant questions that are completely ignored to be answered, and I need an absence of plot holes. I would be perfectly happy with an ending styled after New Vegas. Was it just still pictures in a literal slide machine with one line of narration each about the places I had been and the people I had met? Yes. Was it cheap and simple in terms of production values? Yes. Was it immeasurably more satisfying, providing me with closure for everything I had done, than ME3's ending?
Yes.Which is funny, because I've always thought Mass Effect would be better as an Obsidian game.
This comment was edited on Apr 5, 2012, 19:45.
NOT THE BEES! NOT THE BEES
THEY'RE IN MY EYES AARRGRHGHGGAFHGHFGHFG!