Ellen Anders was never a problem. And I think her and Forge might have has something going. The new Actress and character arc in HW2 breathed fresh air into the character.
I haven't played the sequel, but Anders had some serious alpha female issues in the original game. She was the kind of bitchy woman who absolutely insisted that she didn't need help from anyone, even when she was leagues out of her depth.
The comic that shipped with the game actually made her character ten times better. You could rationalize her coldness towards Forge or her moving her lab into Cutter's observation deck for the sake of the view, because ONI shanghaied her and forced her to translate the Covenant language for the Spirit of Fire. She was lashing out at the other characters because they were in arms' reach and ONI wasn't.
The main Woman stronk one that annoyed me and everyone was Sarah Palmer. They toned her down in 5 to be tolerable bit I'll never come around to like the char until she gets some much needed humbling.
Yeah, but Sarah Palmer isn't a Woman Stronk character. She's not an arrogant hardass because she is a woman, she's an arrogant hardass because the whole inspiration for her character was a YouTube reel of all the Femshep Paragon Interrupt moments in Mass Effect 2.
Compounding that error, she was written by a writer who didn't know much about the military side of mil sci fi, and who didn't realize how important presentation is for a character.
Look at her opening scene. Certain Halo fans like to whine about how 'It was just that one line that pissed everyone off' and how the line was supposed to be a friendly put down, but the presentation in that scene was awful.
In a cutscene after you've cleared out waves upon waves of Prometheans and Crawlers, she steps out from behind a blast door, smirks at you, and says "I thought you'd be taller" in the same tone of voice that Commander Shepard used to tell the Council to get fucked. And she doesn't have her helmet, because 343i is absolutely neurotic about characters wearing helmets.
All told, she isn't presented as the badass that Brian Reed thought she was. She looks like a coward who can't keep track of her kit.
Compare that introduction to one where you find her helmetless, but exhausted surrounded by dead enemies and spent ammunition. In that case, "I thought you'd be taller" works because it carries the undertones of 'Damn, am I glad to see you' or 'I just did my part, you go do yours.'
Hell, compare it to the original introduction they planned for Palmer. Instead of hiding behind a door, she leads a team of Spartan IVs in an airdrop, kicks ass, and loses her helmet when she uses it to dispose of a live pulse grenade. The "I thought you'd be taller" line is still delivered in that same tone of voice, but it's from some random Marine with Lasky.