I think we can just conclude that Thrasher and DeepO are younger at heart and more easily impressed by the shooting gallery spectacle and edgy characters
I suppose I might be a toddler at heart in that case, as I actually enjoyed the third game the most out of the three.
I hated the Paragon/Renegade system in ME2. You must nearly always choose either the "rude" or "pushover" responses, regardless of whether they fit with your character concept, in order to unlock important content later in the game and squad members like Morinth. You were penalized for any attempt to roleplay the way you think your character would choose to respond. As a result, the dialogue options became a sort of mindless, repetitive mini-game and I never felt any identification at all with the Shepard character.
It was liberating to later play ME3 - with the neutral reputation points, I was finally able to identify with the character I was playing and choose whichever dialogue responses that best fit the role.
Also the levels in ME3 were much more open and interesting compared to the ME2 level design, which was largely corridor, cut scene, corridor, cut scene.
The weapon modifications and slight expansion of the skills was also a nice change.
The choose-your-color ending was pretty lame, but up to that point it was by far the best game out of the three. I believe the ending has been enhanced with a DLC. At any rate, I've never enjoyed passively watching long cutscenes in games, what's more important to me is the gameplay, so the ending didn't bother me too much.
Never finished ME1, so I can't yet compare it in great detail. I played a little under 20 hours. I loved the idea of flying around to various planets and exploring each one, but they were mostly empty except for the base or whatever you were supposed to find there. Would have been wonderful to have some sort of random encounter system for sandbox gameplay. The combat was a little glitchy at times, and I didn't fully understand the inventory and skill system. Not sure whether the Paragon/Renegade system was identical to ME2, but I don't recall feeling like I had to mindlessly choose the same "rude" or "pushover" response over and over.