I'm not saying there shouldn't be any, I've written great walls of text on the subject before. But the huge series of barren worlds with nothing meaningful to do on them was terrible design. I'm not asking for a new town every 5 paces, or a tiny shrunken world. But there needs to be a reason for me doing this all that isn't just collecting shitty tokens which are pointed out to you on the map from the second you land.
I don't even think there really should be random UNC worlds to land on at all, and that the game should take place on a relatively small number of celestial bodies, but allow you to traverse between hub areas and explore well constructed environments with interesting things to look at and find.
That's one of the major points we disagree on. A small handful of explorable "theme park" planets, each hand-crafted to be capital-I Interesting at all times, is paradoxically going to be
less engaging to me than a bunch of unknown planets that may or may not have stuff on them.
Ideally, exploring unknown worlds should be a crapshoot. Sometimes you find nothing of value. Often you find something that justifies the trip or is mildly interesting. Occasionally you find something really valuable or out of the ordinary. It's the rarity of those moments that makes them special and memorable. That's why I want them to introduce randomized unknown worlds. It's the difference between, "I haven't found the Big Thing on
this planet yet, but every planet has
one major event or setpiece on it, so I'll just keep searching until I find this one, too" and "Holy shit! I just found a massive Prothean obelisk on a jungle world in my current playthrough, with what looks like a hidden elevator leading down! I'm going to check this out and post screenshots!"
Sure, in an ideal world you might have a more Deus Ex style of role playing where the RPG progression is about unlocking parts of the world and giving unique paths and ways to approach things. However we never had anything similar to this in ME1, as long as you had a "thief" in your party you could go anywhere and do anything, and progression was solely about getting new combat abilities to cast.
My point there is that each game seems to move further and further away from having any sort of meaningful character stats, to the point where it
is kind of like a glorified perk system now. I was hoping for more in the way of stats and some useful noncombat skills in ME2, rather than streamlining that stuff away. I know Fallout 3 gets shat upon frequently by some folks here, but I felt that game (and New Vegas after it) did a really good job of combining ranged combat/gunplay with a stat-driven skills system, and provided tools to approach problems in multiple ways. I'd like a little more of that in my Mass Effect, please.
No I had huge problems with planet scanning, I complained about it on the official forums when it came out and I'm glad it's gone. But people grossly exaggerate the amount of it you needed to do. You found resources in side quests, if you were importing the game you got a pile of resources at the start, and in a best case scenario you need maybe 30 minutes of mining to get all the important upgrades. If you're a completionist you spend longer mining, although this is of marginal importance unless you're playing max difficulty. The main reason I find mining more tolerable than the UNC missions is because in addition to being much briefer, it's also mindless - I used to watch TV shows on a laptop while I was mining. Shitty? Absolutely. I also think the mandatory Mako sections were bad, and the UNC planets were terrible.
I liked the Mako sequences. I enjoyed the simple act of driving around on these planets, listening to the background music and taking in the atmosphere, seeing what there was to see. (If that's hard for people to grasp, I wonder what they'd make of something like Euro Truck Simulator 2, a game about sedately driving a delivery truck around Europe that a lot of folks seem to unironically enjoy.) It made the ME universe larger to me in a way that being restricted to a handful of planets wouldn't, regardless of the amount of content on them. Being told, "the game universe is actually much bigger than what you're seeing here, but you can't visit any of it" just doesn't convey the same sense of scale.
The scanning segments may have been shorter than the Mako sequences, but they
felt longer and more tedious to me because I got nothing from them. They didn't drive home the scale of the setting or enhance the atmosphere. They had no intrinsic entertainment value in their own right. They were filler of the worst kind. I'm glad we agree on that much, at least.