I'll argue against you on that.
They goofed up hard on BL1's story the same reason many other games of its ilk goof up hard on that aspect: in that industry, it's not a priority, to put it mildly. No 'proof of concept' anything, it's a matter of math and culture, and those add up to results that I can sympathize with, but are still frustrating when something has as much *style* and *atmosphere* as that game did at times.
Sometimes, it would start to grab me. And then it would fumble the ball, and be all the more frustrating for it.
A lot of games run into that, where you can tell they'd planned on going a little further with a point, but had to cut or couldn't figure out how to do it without fucking up the rest of the game. And the story doesn't exist in a vacuum, a game is, ideally, a unified piece with parts that work together to reinforce each other. And BL1, like many games, failed at parts of that, that's all.