My guess is that its not actually a fault of the artists to have chosen those rather "unconventional" faces, but a dictation by some department leaders not to havetl;dr: there's a reason main characters look good in games, and a large part of it is story-based. Mass Effect's writers used to understand that... but I suppose they have new ones now that don't quite know what they're doing.
the preset female faces look pretty.
(whereas the default male Ryder looks handsome, and very similar to the actor portraying him)
The animation quality is a different topic. Here they seem to have a run into technical issues. .. Given that the face-animation of secondary characters dont look much better than on 10 year old Mass-Effect 1 characters.