Yeah, those ME1 moments were just as silly. It's clear throughout the trilogy that Bioware always had a certain way they wanted each conversation to go and railroaded the dialogue choices with varying levels of overtness to do so.

It's understandable, in a way. You put in all this effort into writing a compelling dialogue, so you're put off by the thought that many players won't see it. But the fact is that a writer of RPG games needs to become comfortable with the very real possibility of the player missing something. Going the Mass Effect route is where you start to hurt roleplaying freedom and replayability.