While I agree, I can kind of see the point of people a little disgruntled over the Iron Maiden choice, simply because Stark's knowledge is a little
too disruptive to the setting. Consider for a moment the Batarian War. Does anyone here, anyone at all, think there's any chance that the Alliance, with Revy's massive tech boost, won't basically steamroll the Batarians in the upcoming war, like within the next year or so? Batarian civilization is ancient, staid, and calcified, coasting on the successes of their long-dead ancestors. Their tech is at the same level it's been for centuries; they haven't needed to innovate any because of their position as the gateway to the Terminus and its eezo stockpiles, but we no longer fear their disruption of eezo prices because our cheap laser frigates can already outfight their cruisers and next quarter's models will be able to outrange
and outfight the few dreadnoughts that they haven't put in mothballs.
The alpha strike the Hegemony just tried was basically their only reasonable chance of harming us, and for all that it's a tragedy to the local economy of Landing and shook up the Alliance it didn't really affect us at all in the strategic sense, and now it's all over but the screaming. The only options the Hegemony have left are employing the Alpha Relay (as they have) and selling themselves to the Leviathan of Dis, in which case we're stuck fighting the Reapers a decade early, but they'll still need years to ramp up and by that time we'll have killed their ability to project force into space so it won't matter.
By the time the Batarian War is over (two years tops) we'll be well into exponential production territory.
Project Earthfall will have given us the equivalent of three Space Factory IIIs worth of production in 3-4 quarters rather than six; we'll have another half-to-full dozen Space Factories spread through Sol and the "core" SA worlds;
Project Via will have made hyper-mobility easy and cheap to attain for any human (and Asari, since they seem to have picked up on the concept as well), making space migration easy; we'll have Eternal Youth and Stealth Laser Frigates fully implemented (thereby getting the Salarians to love us forever); and our mining company, pulling resources from virgin territory thanks to multi-core drives, will be ensuring that we don't have anything to worry about in terms of resources.
It's kind of daunting finding anything that can realistically challenge us at this point. Other than the Reapers themselves, in about 3-4 years our only real possible challenges are the Citadel suddenly being suborned and declaring war on us, like us personally, without the SA interfering, or the Geth deciding to go against their canon personalities and go full-on homogenizing AI swarm. As an example, Landing is now under an assault shield, with our own lab complex under a heavy bombardment shield, so last quarter's attack would basically just fizzle completely this quarter.
