Most of this wasn't a problem with Inquisition though.
Oh, really? To me and a ton of other people it was a huge problem, not to mention MMO elemets all over the place.
So basically you don't want RPG elements in your...action RPG game?
Well, first of all, Mass Effect is not a traditional RPG (SWKOTOR for example), it's more of a action game with basic RPG elements in terms of character development (they've tried to change that a little bit in ME3 but it is still very basic RPG elements when compared to something like Dragon Age: Origins), it's more of an RPG only in terms of role playing.
You play as Shepard, making choises along the way and shaping your own unique character and story throughout the course of 3 games -
this is what ME must be all about as an RPG game and there's absolutely no need for crafting, a shit ton of loot and other boring shit and busy work.
Now, I think that resource gathering is... well, inevitable, cuz you starting to explore new galaxy with not a huge ammount of recources and you must replenish to simply survie and to keep doin' whatcha doin', but there must be machinery available like rovers or something which can also explore planets for you, gather resources, information about the planet and stuff like that. Resource gathering must be present in the game only as a survival element for the ship and it's crew to live and function (fuel, resources for life support and other systems) but not as a survival elements like in recent survival games with timers, bars and annoying as hell shit like that. Food, water, medical supplies and stuff like that you can buy on space stations like ones in 10-15 hours - really no that huge of a problem.
And I know, ME takes place in distant future and you've more easy ways to do something like gathering resources, but you fucking can't do everything by yourself like in god awful Inquisition in which you've the whole organisation and people to do this stuff for you cuz it's teir job, not yours (but you're doing it anyway cuz no one else can do it as efficent and as fast as you, you even cheat to make your useless advisers to work much faster) as an leader of organization, cuz you've better and more important things to do than gather flowers, rocks, minerals, complete shitty MMO fetch quest a stuff like that. Is CEO of any company (for example) doing low level job for low level employees? Fuck no! Why? Because it's not his job to do low level stuff like wash floors, windows, copy documents, deliver some stuff etc., no, he has more important things to do. So, ME is an RPG and not farming or service delivery simulator, and you as a leader of the ship and representative of the human race have more important things to do than busy work of the low level stuff. Now, I'm not saying that you you must sit in your chair, get fat and do nothing, but you must not do low level stuff which simply boring, dull, nowhere near as interesting as the story stuff and everything related to it and quests. This stuff is wasting a lot of your time for nothing.
Let's say you've a rovers on multiple planets (which you've explored already using Mako and completed missions on them) and they're collecting information or gathering resources for you over time, in this case you can just fly by, collect everything that was gathered and return to more important stuff. Or you can make 10 or 15 people from your stuff stay on a planet, form a small colony and gather information and resources for you, and later you can fly by and pick them up along with resources and do the same on the next planet. It's not that hard to do and implement really, but they must not be slow as fuck and collect only 10-20 rocks or minerals in 1-3 hours or something like in Inquisition cuz it's fucking stupid, time wasting and only makes you do everything by yourself cuz you do it faster and more efficent
which is not acceptable!
Also, there must be (imo) no expirience gain for killing, scanning and gathering stuff, expirience must be earned only for compleating quests and missions to illiminate time wasting elements such as killing a shit ton of mobs, scanning stuff and other shit if you do not want to waste your time on all this and simply want to ignore it. Crafting is also useless and time wasting mechanic which also involves boring inventory management and gathering stuff. They should make something like in Dead Space series and what I mean by that is you can find schematics for weapons and armor here and there to costumize your character, get the schematics for completing missions and quests to make role playing more important than anything else. As for upgrading weapons and armor, same stuff - find schematics and simply build stuff in your ship on a engineering deck without gathering anything. And to make it not as simple, they can just make you wait a day or so while engineers doing their job and making new stuff for you.
What else.... hmm.... OH! It's a fucking Sci-Fi game which takes place in space and galaxy full solar systems, stars, planets, ship battle remans, abandon stations and stuff goddamin it, there's absolutely must be a fair amount of missions (not space battles or something like in recent Battlefront game which is very basic and really not that inteteresting, plus it's not easy to implement and make something more complex and it's not necessary really) and space exploration that takes place in Zero-G and open space! This must be in the game, period! No excuses! How can you make a space RPG and not have Zero- G stuff in it? It's like Star Wars without space battles for Christ's sake. Just look at the opening stuff in Dead Space 3 (or even some stuff in Zero-G in Dead Space 2), it's not that hard to do even for X360 / PS3 with an extremely outdated hardware and it was a lot more interesting than any of the ground stuff you do in the game and absolutely everyone liked this stuff. Now, just think about this guys, only one DLC in the entire first ME trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker) had at least someting similar to Zero-G or open space which is freaking insane!
Most of your fears are assumptions based off of nothing from what I'm seeing. So you're afraid the new Mass Effect game will have zero interesting stuff to do, no cool missions or characters, etc. Based off...what exactly? That doesn't sound reasonable.
Oh, my fears is based on DAI and recent trends in gaming - quantity over quality, crafting, loot, busy work over interesting, memorable and more meaningful stuff, survival elements and a shit ton of resource gathering. All of this stuff (but I'm sure i've forgot about something) has only one purpose - waste your time on a borung and dull shit and make you think that the game has a ton of content, when in reality it's not true at all. Sometimes even the story stuff is shit like in Mad Max for example, so there's absolutely no reason to buy this game unless you want to waste a lot of your time just to make a bad ass car. There's plenty of games with the stuff like this which is ruining them and only make them worse, remove it and the game sundenly becomes a lot better than it was before. Look at the Division, Ubisoft recently released a patch to eliminate bullet sponge problem and other stuff, what does that tell you? It's an indication that modern games has a shit ton of useless and unnecessary mechanics which only makes them worse tedious, dull etc. Even though Ubisoft did a good thing, It is still a very sad thing to see that they didn't understad that all the shit they fixed should not be in the game at the first place and a lot of people wasted a shit ton of their time in the process of doing all this shit.
All I'm trying to say is that ME is better that all this and must not contain unnecessary mechanics, busy work, boring, dull, tedious and time wasting stuff, but it will (nowadays you must please everyone even if it means that you're making the game worse in some aspects in the process), I'm sure of it, but I really hope I'm wrong. To be honest, I've zero faith in BioWare after DA2 and DAI (and after ME3's ending to an extent) and I've plenty of reasons to be extremely sceptical when it comes to the stuff and games they make. And can you honestly blame me for this?
P.S. I'm sorry for bad english in some places, I'll try to fix that later and I hope you guys still understand what I'm trying to say here.