well, the meat of the game really isn't the collectors thing, it is the work of gathering your team and doing their loyalty missions. in that sense i'm actually quite enamoured with what bioware did. the space opera stuff didn't pan out as well in this game (except i actually quite enjoyed a bunch of the environments, with the grandiose sequence in the heart of the collector ship and the bit where you're running around on a derelict reaper, the port side of which is exposed to space, being standouts) but where they did succeed is that they made the universe concrete, tangible, and interesting in a way it previously wasn't. the characters you collect are meant not as stereotypes of their species but individuals who codify and exemplify certain traits, and "earning their loyalty" inevitably means learning something about their culture which was hitherto fascinating/unrevealed/unexplored.
i think that's what makes the idea of shephard's relationships with them as kind of "friendship through therapy" work – the situations they're anxious to achieve closure with largely reflect their culture. with grunt, it's krogan infighting and a fear of a culture dying. with mordrin, it's serious doubts about how his species uses its gifts for science. with miranda, it's grave concerns about fate, genetics and personal ownership of the two. &c. bioware reveal these anxieties by having you blast/talk/blast-talk your way through them, and while there might be disagreements over how effective that can possibly be (full disclosure: i dig blasting dudes and chatting with dudes as primary gameplay modes so i found it basically effective) the point is more that it's something they try to do, and that as both an exercise in storytelling and a narrative hook it's at the very least super interesting.
i'm a bit bummed about how you aren't primarily a galactic superhero anymore (and i'm incidentally still bummed about how straight-up evil some of the renegade options are!) but if that's the tradeoff i have to make in order to make shephard feel like one character in a smartly-populated universe, it's one i'm willing to make.