Rush through it, turn the difficulty down, buy a Spectre pistol or whatever, ignore any side quests you have left, and just go to town on the rest of the game. You're past all the really shit parts of the game, and the one part of Mass Effect 1 that actually was definitely, inarguably, legitimately great was the ending (and by 'ending' I mean the last 2-3 hours leading up to the credits).
You'll probably like Mass Effect 2 more, if you find the first game a chore. Personally, contrary to popular opinion, I thought that ME2 retained or expanded on pretty much 100% of the meaningful RPG elements that the first game had, while massively improving the core gameplay, at least up to the level of a halfway decent cover shooter. It's also, for my money, the best-written game in the franchise, and I actually felt that it kind of delivered on the idea of letting you run around in a fairly expansive sci-fi world, whereas ME1 felt kind of cheap, like the video game equivalent of the original Star Trek.