I'm going to say 'no, I don't enjoy inventory management and loot systems.' Not in the 'typical RPG' sense, at least. They inevitably become pants salesman games, and I'm not terribly interested in collecting pants for spending cash.
Inventory systems, by and large, violate what I've come to believe an important lesson for effective game design: don't force the player to be the middleman in routine tasks and transactions. For the same reason I wouldn't want to have press a button in the middle of a reload animation in order to reload a gun, I don't see value in being the middleman in things that overwhelmingly happen a single way.
When you have a Whatever X weapon that's superior in every way to a Whatever IX model, I see no reason that the game should even let me lug around a Whatever IX if the only profitable action is to sell it. Just auto-sell it and save the trouble and tedium of being a gopher. Heck, why am I the one going around to search bodies like a grave robber? If there's only one profitable/natural choice, to loot and sell, why can't my companions do it on my behalf?
What I mean is why should you have to wait till Mordin gives you a generic pistol when you can already pick up generic pistol from dead enemy? Also, Mordin was the only person who could give you the gun at that time in the whole game. It's sort of like how action games, you get specific weapons at specific times and that's the only way you can get those weapons. Almost all weapons in ME2 & ME3 were like this but ME3 did it better by having a larger variety of weapons.
I liked that but I also wish that you aren't only allowed to pick up weapons in scripted locations for nearly all your weapons.
Here's two honest questions for you: how would you see weapons only slowly be introduced to the player, and what would you do with all copies of an old weapon after you picked it up for the first time? Neither of the answers seem particularly useful in supporting any 'realism' argument.
The first is relevant because tying weapon collection to enemy usage seems to me to be a sure-fire way of limiting enemy variety and capability in the early game. You'd never have early-game bossfights against those using the Revenant, for example. Everyone would start using the same dinky pistol and SMG, and for balance reasons the weapons would still come at comparable rates- which crowds our sense of realism of why 'pick up' is the natural solution.
The second, though, is the far more practical problem of what to do with extra copies and inferior models. If we accept that we can replicate a gun back at base (fabricate), then only the first gun of each model is really relevant to expanding our abilities. Even if we have to wait to return to base, that still means that we only need three of a model (or whatever the squad limit is)- and that after that, wall others are junk.
If they're going to be junk 99% of the time, to the point that we only exist as the middle man between enemy defeat and cashing them in the shop, why bother with that? Just give us the appropriate cash reward each time we kill the enemies, and be done with it.
Now, if you need/want a better reason we can't pick up weapons, just hand-wave something like 'biometrically locked' or 'weapon kill-switches that self-destruct on death'). In that case, loot could be relevant... though it'd be more in the sense of whatever good 'weapon shards' are for. And you still might as well just have them auto-collected on death rather than have us run between long distances to try and get them all.
Truthfully, I only hit the inventory limit in my first playthrough
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The only way not to hit the inventory limit regularly is to not engage in systemic looting- ie, to ignore the very system that you're insisting is important.
*on the subject of weapon quality/condition schemes*
Good idea, after all weapons in Mass Effect get hot and causes wear and tear damage over time.
We also go back to the ship, where maintenance is done, between every mission.
Quality systems don't work well in a mission-based context like the ME series, and certainly not well with a loot table. They may make sense in an RPG context like fallout, but unless we pretend that military/protagonist ships don't offer repair/maintenance services between missions there's no plausible need for our cutting-edge maintained weapons to break apart every fifteen minutes or so.
If the goal is to force weapon swap-outs, a more credible design is the Halo series, where weapon management is key because ammo is limited. That's 'looting', but not with loot tables or anything, and it avoids the infinite pocket syndrome by limiting the number of weapons you can carry each time.
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