i think you guys are maybe underselling the way that minute decisions affect the tenor of the game world. you let the council die? you don't see the council. you let them live? you do. one cutscene, but a cutscene that when you're playing it makes a ton of difference. same diff with wrex. and having certain areas populated differently is just as interesting, since it creates a sense of continuity. the big picture is the same, sure, but like mass effect isn't a game where the cool stuff happens in the big picture.
they pulled it off in mass effect 2, i stick by that. i'm i guess a dude who thinks that the experience of a text is fairly important, and the experience may only be subtly different between a renegade and a paragon playthrough in terms of what you import but i'd argue that those differences do, in fact, matter. and if the decisions you make in mass effect 3 have a subtle effect on the game? so long as it creates an interesting story, then good. frankly, if – for example – they do kill off the council in me3, well, that wouldn't have happened to a different shepard. and so that matters.