I know it sounds Inquisitiony, but it really doesn't sound exactly like it. Not to that extreme.
Excluding Skyhold and Val Royeaux, Inqusition had 10 locations that more or less followed the same formula in checklist shit
- Find and set up camp travel points
- Find Ocularums, then find Shards
- Find and mark all Landmarks
- Find and complete Astrariums
- Kill the High Dragon
- In addition to hunting down Mosaic Pieces, Bottles of Thedas, Treasure Maps, Glyphs, and so on.
And what did all this busy work feed into? What were the currency metagames?
- Levelling your character
- Levelling the Inquisition
- Earning Inquisition points
Levelling the Inquisition is a neat gimmick but loses steam quickly, takes a long time to do, and has no significant impact on the game world. Earning Inquisition points is used to unlock new locations, but earning points is also easy, and with only ten locations to access quickly become superfluous if you're doing a lot of said busy work. So in the end it all feeds into one thing, your player levelling. And this is alongside still having narrative driven quests and a large number of them. I can dig people disliking the combat because I don't really like it, but that's an isolated problem not really relevant to the busywork design.
My point is Inquisition was a weird extreme in its distribution of tasks and busywork. Ten locations densely packed with stuff to collect and find, almost all of which funnelled towards a single objective: raising your character's level. Hence why it gets boring, and all objectives and busywork blend together.
Mass Effect 4 seems more like it's trying to take these ideas and expand them into more developed concepts that are beneficial in multiple ways, particularly in the reach of your exploration and where you can travel, rather than two dimensional "you found the thing/marked the spot, here's some points, goodbye". It sounds like it has a more interesting feedback loop of progression and growth.
Explore galaxy, looking for planets with points of interest, that can include habitable surface, rich in resources, and who knows what else.
Build settlements on habitable planets, decide what kind of settlement it is and how that feeds back into your adventure (remove fog of war on map? funnel in additional resources?)
Find blueprints, combine with resources to build new equipment that lets you traverse new areas (eg: jetpack)
Upgrade ship, upgrade Mako, upgrade player, to explore previously inaccessible, hazardous areas
It could be a disaster, but the feedback loop of play and development is certainly a lot more interesting than anything Inquisition was doing, which borderlined on nothing. Even something like the Remnant Vault Raids. How many dungeons did Inquisition have? Mass Effect 4 is doing them, with rewards, leading you to a second tier of dungeons with more rewards.