Akernis wrote...
My thoughts exactly, frudi I sometimes get the impression that you can read my mind 
What? Mind reading? No, certainly not! What are you implying, that I've been stealing Devil's research data, running my own secret experiments on Asari and Leviathans, trying to figure out their mind reading techniques? Because I'm not! Those claims are preposterous!
*crickets*
Stop looking at me like that! It's not true! :innocent:
Anyway, back to sanity and the issue of Ash and Kaidan... I was never much into either of them. Not that I disliked them, in fact I still respected and admired them both, they just both seemed kind of bland compared to what were to me the more interesting alien characters. And I found it kind of hard to relate to them, especially to Ash.
When it came to the decision on Virmire, I almost always ended up saving Ash; in fact I don't know if I've ever even imported any of my very few Kaidan savegames into ME2. Not that I had something against him specifically, just a combination of reminding me too much of Carth and insistently ninja-mancing my femSheps. Both led me to eventually more or less ignore him in most playthroughs and that also made the Virmire decision pretty straightforward. Sometimes I actually felt kind of bad about how dismissively I'd treated the poor guy

So in ME3 I obviously had Ash alive and I thought she really got treated poorly by the writers, it's like they purposefully tried to make her as annoying and dull as possible. At first all she does is bit*h to Shepard every time she opens her mouth, but even once that's over she doesn't really have any significant content. We hardly find out anything new about her. Even if she's not exactly my favourite I think she deserved to be presented better, there's plenty of interesting sides to her that could have been explored.
I figured Kaidan would have gotten a similar treatment in ME3, but when I did a no-import playthrough with him alive I was really surprised by how much better he was treated compared to Ash. Especially his transformation from being initially sceptical about Shep to finally trusting her again was made a lot more believable; with Ash I always got the feeling that she never really got over it but instead just dropped it because that's what she's supposed to do, because Shep is her commanding officer and Ash is supposed to fall in line and not question her. But with Kaidan we actually get a really insightful dialogue about his thoughts on Cerberus, on Illusive Man and on Shep working with them.
And in general I felt we get more new insight into his character compared to Ash - we learn more about his service history before ME3, about his family, his thoughts on the war, he even has some nice dialogues with the other crew members (including a talk with Adams and Shep about Liara after Thessia). All in all I think he was just portrayed much better and in fact I've come to really like him from that single playthrough.