What concerns me is that this is the second time I can remember something like this happening with BioWare.

First, to be honest, I haven't played Andromeda, so I don't know how bad this is (or isn't).  However, I think back to Dragon Age 2, which was another big release that suffered from bad decisions.  I'm not talking about subjective factors like story or characters, I'm talking about the decision to reuse dungeons over and over instead of spending the time (or budget) to create new ones, which very obviously would have made the game better.  There is really no debating that and it was plain as day for anyone, much less experience developers, to see.  There were so many good things about that game that such a cheap-out move was really a shame.

It makes me wonder if someone at the top is putting other factors above quality or if there isn't some other failure in the chain of command.

Sounds like a case of putting too much on their plate with not enough time, resulting in a less polished product. It sounds like this game needed some delays for more polish.

Just keep in mind that their parent company, you know, under whose leadership many directors and lead designers left, is the same that literally released the same game two years in a row with a reskin, for 60$

Very few games have both.  What are you even saying?

...That's exactly what I'm saying. It's infeasable by the metric of rational possibility. They are restricted by time, budget, and man power. They thought they had enough of each to have their cake and eat it too with this. They didn't. The face animations are the result. 

Its alot easier to make a linear good looking game than it is to make an openworld game. Also if you give a company unlimited time and budget than of course your going to get quality with qauntity. Look at Star Citizen with a budget of $140m+. I dont consider Cloud Emporium Games the best devs however with a budget like theres and time frame you will get both on release.

They officially delayed the game once, it was supposed to launch in 2016, and who knows how many more times they pushed the launch further back but we don't know it because they hadn't given a date yet to the public.

After all, the game was first teased all the way back at E3 in 2014.

We don't know how much of that budget (by the way, where did you get that figure from?) went into development and how much into marketing. And the game has been in development for more than 3 years by a team made of hundred of members.

We don't know if they ended with budget problems or not.

The problem is the 5 years between the preproduction and the release. A decision was taken 5 years ago, the early devlopment implemented the algorithm, then they started to implement the facial animation before realising they would never have enough time to finish them and they couldn't go back without tremendously delaying the final game for a single element that went wrong.

So they didn't realize the amount of work it would need and where caught with thei pants down. Gotcha!

Now it's only a matter of can it be fixed with patches?

Obviously not. The facial animation, for as much as I know (not much, I'm no animator) should have been a team's work for a big part of the devlopment cycle. It's not a buggy algorithm you can quick fix trough spaghetti coding, it's a long and tedious job. That would require a big investment for a single visual job. Even Nintendo level remasters don't redo facial animations years later (i.e. FFX HD is one hell of a remaster, every model including monsters were remade instead of just the textures, so the old facial animations look off on the new character models).