I've been downloading the rest of New Orders Discography today, and it just finished so I'm getting on now.
Than what's your frame of reference to compare "clunkiness" too. The cover system is pretty smooth, the combat, although a little simplistic and bare bones for my liking, is pretty fluid. I can combine "force" powers and weapon fire and squad commands work. Again they're a bit simplistic but I wouldn't call mass effect clunky. So while ME2 really tried to streamline the combat over ME1 they made it a bit simplistic but in that simplicity it certainly is more fluid. Also when considering games to play for single player, why would you rule Mass Effect out for clunkiness and not because you have played it before...
So...you're comparing mirror's edge, a game who's "smoothness" is completely reliant on the skill of the player controlling Faith, to Mass Effect 2 in terms of clunkiness? If you don't want to play the game fine, don't give some ridiculous reason that can't really be backed up as justification. I could have named much better reasons not to play the game after playing it like 4 times.
Mass Effect is incredibly clunky. Combat is boring, and something you have to get through, not something you enjoy doing.
The combat being boring, and the game being clunky are two separate things I can pick any word from the dictionary and make a case about it I suppose. How "clunky" a game is depends on fluidity of the gameplay itself, not some preconceived notion of how fun it is to you. If there are areas of the game where the difficulty seems out of place, if random objects stop you from moving around, if you aim at people and nothing happens. If the game suddenly lags at weird spots, all that is the fluidity of the game. While mass effect, like any other game, has small issues with it, again I would not call "clunky" the word to describe mass effect
The combat is boring because it's chunky. I didn't use the word "chunky" because it's an established fact the ME2 is chunky.
There have been some gameplay previews at GDC on several websites. Every site says the game is the opposite of it's trailer: silly and akin to Dead Rising.