I don't see the embarrassment at all. It's not like having both a female and male character with the quality,quantity and range of animations CIG is aiming can be considered an easy task. I mean Assassins Creed Unity cut off it's female avatar completely because of how much work it would take them for example.
Oh come on now - it looked totally ridiculous!!!! Nobody's saying it's an easy task (although CiG are making it harder on themselves because they want to use mocap for stuff which frankly doesn't require it), but what was presented was awful. Mass Effect awful, and then some.
If they'd turned off the face-ache stuff, and just run the mission like normal players without the pathetic (and it was pathetic) dialog (heck, my 8 & 11 year olds who play minecraft over the net don't even indulge in such purile comms chatter!), then I would have been far more understanding of the crash and subsequent replay of the scripted level.
But they padded out a poor demo with a poor feature they thought would pull the wool over peoples eyes and everyone (who hasn't been around gaming/TrackIR/cams before) would think "oh it doesn't matter that the demo is horribly bugged, because this face stuff is so absolutely amazing, I don't care".
The face/avatar stuff was absolutely pathetic, and the worst thing about the whole horrible experience imho.