Oh dear, more godawful Mass Effect fanon tripe despite only being distantly, tangentially relevant to the current quest. Unless the QM decides on a different followup crossover, in which case It's not relevant at all.
But this should only take a minute, so...
The genophage:
1- only normalized krogan breeding rates to something that wouldn't flood all of known space within a few generations. The Krogan decline afterward is entirely on them for continuing to be hyper aggressive murder lizards instead of adapting.
2- was the alternative to literal genocide. Because despite being a footnote in the modern lexicon, what we know of the Krogan Rebellions paints a very grim picture.
Is irrelevant because it was the equivalent of a minor boarder dispute to the Turians that the Alliance committed half their total armada to counter, and they know it.
The only reason humanity is as "important" as they are in canon is because they're bluffing their asses off. As we already knew due to population (trillions serviced by individual comm buoys vs billions of humans), military commitment (trying to land grab like a galactic power stretched their patrols and defenses too thin, they couldn't even meet the minimum commitment to the Citadel Defense Fleet and probably would have voided their Council seat), and pre-first-contact gear and equipment (explicitly called museum pieces, known FTL speed of 0.14ly/day, and even that much was only possible because of the literal "how to uplift primitives: for dummies" cache they were sitting on).
Oh, also, because it was confirmed in Andromeda when the Alliance high command ordered the SAM project shut down, because the Alliance couldn't afford too much scrutiny, because they were trying to get as many concessions from the Council as possible before they realized the depths of their bluffing.
So... yeah. If the cost of entry into galactic society was to grin and bear the initial fuckup, the Alliance was going to grin for all they were worth.
Finally, and this is something
@Ithillid should be aware of, the FCW itself was later explained to have been kicked off by a hidden Reaper cultist (the commander in charge of the partol) and his stooges. More level heads on that patrol would have avoided the whole thing completely. So I will be
very disappointed if we're somehow made to jump through
this old hoop for some reason.
I mean, unless NOD or the Initiative First nutjobs kick something like it off.
Was entirely their own fault and continues to be entirely their own fault.
More on that here:
EDIT in case it wasn't clear: I think everyone basically agrees the Quarians' situation sucks. Nobody should have to live like that. But this thread is about determining if they are or are not self-sabotaging and if it's their own issues keeping them the way they are, or if it's all the...
forums.spacebattles.com
Because I made a thread exactly for this purpose: collecting sources and evidence that the Quarians shit their own bed and continue to lie in it all on their own, no Citadel intervention required.
Was already dealt with as far as the Council could take it.
Look, I know the games like to present the Council as the prime leaders of the galaxy. I know the Mass Effect fan
dumb ate that shit right up.
I also know all of Mass Effect 3 made it extremely clear they were essentially the Space!UN, with no actual authority on galactic politics if their big three members weren't willing to back them up.
So unless the pirates and slavers were stupid enough to move against the Citadel Defense Fleet directly, or unless they presented vulnerable enough targets for the SPECTREs to deal with, the best the Council themselves could do was sanction the Batarians to hell and kick them off the Citadel. Which they did. Anything more than that is up to individual member nations and weather they were willing to go to war.
And I don't know if you noticed, but we don't go to war over real life slave rings either, much as we probably should.
Spies gonna spy. The Salarians are just better at it than anyone else. If you have an issue with that, git gud.
Again, this is backed primarily by social convention and the implicit threat of the big three on the Council. If a SPECTRE dies doing something stupid, that's on them.
Really, if they were as big an issue as you're trying to paint them, the STG would be totally unnecessary. Who needs a spy agency when you have agents that can literally claim they're allowed to do whatever they want if they get caught?
See also: Shepard Plays With Red Tape On Noveria, Mass Effect 1.
So I fairly disassembled all your arguments, but here I'd like to re-refer you to the First Contact War segment.
If not for them bluffing through their teeth, humanity would be largely irrelevant at the galactic scale.
What they want or don't want is irrelevant.
They do that anyway, though. GDI being GDI.
I'd also like to point out that unless we get trans-dimensional portals involved, this is likely a fusion universe. Which means
aaaaall of Mass Effect history, from the Leviathans and Reapers (if they even exist) to the Protheans and the modern species, evolved and advanced in a universe where
early 2000s Earth was developing ion cannons and man portable laser weapons. Seriously, aside from
maybe material purity and availability, you can't blame that on tiberium.
What exactly makes you think nutty super-science is restricted to humans?
Also, the Tiberium asteroid was the fork between Tib and Red Alert, which is
its own brand of nutty super-science. It would be cool to see something come of that.
That's... capitalism. You just described capitalism. And it only gets that bad in late stage, zero-or-minimal restriction free market economy, like certain modern day countries we shouldn't name here to avoid real life politics. Given proper oversight and restrictions, it makes a passable economic model.
But, yeah, most of our population is YZers, who got shafted pretty hard by capitalist GDI.
The only thing I take issue with is the "enforced inequality" bit. Beyond the
typical issues with economic stratification in a capitalist society, wherein poverty actively makes it harder to get out of poverty, nobody is forced to live badly. And those issues are, again, endemic to the capitalist model, not the Citadel in particular.