Eh, in kinda the same boat, but ME1 is not niche. ME1 was good with complexity, maybe it was clunky with the menus, but I didn't care too much. The shooting was fine, although I can only speak for PC, and I far preferred being able to alpha strike with all of my abilities to having to wait for a cooldown on everything, not to mention I don't have that many abilities anyway. Yeah, ME1 was a bit over the top, but it let me Spec my character how I wanted them to be. ME2, Shepard is a guy who fires guns and that's mostly it. Even in my non-Vanguard playthrough attempt (Couldn't get past the boring, repetitive combat. It was just too boring to even try)when I tried engineer, sentinel and adept, I found myself using my gun more than my abilities as it had a quicker reload time. Some of the streamlining was ok, though I wouldn't call it good. The complete removal of the inventory bugged me, I like having limited resources to work with and having to put things in the best combo for success, now I have infinite everything, all I have to do is select the most recently acquired/DLC weapon and let my squad go.
I'm not going to touch the story, that has been done so many times. But ME2 IMO was not better than 1.
Still, ME3 looks somewhat interesting. The tampering they are doing with it for a wider audience is speech recognition on Kinect, so what? Things like weapon upgrades are coming back, I can carry and use any gun, but only certain combinations of them, I get weapon and skill stat bars back, so I can actually see which gun is better, or if they are better in different situations, we get to run around during combat rather than sitting behind a wall. It is looking somewhat good in some aspects, I just hope that I get to use my abilities with seperate cooldowns (though I'm pretty much sure I won't D