User blog comment:SanjayBeast/Anyone else pissed about lack of Protheans in MP?/@comment-3440929-20120528121131/@comment-1388547-20120530025739

When they created the Collectors, the Reapers had access to whole populations of living Protheans to work with, during hundreds of years of war. They had plenty of experimental subjects to work with to understand Prothean biology, and they could use living Protheans as host mothers to carry cloned embryos. I'm sure they also weren't pressed for time to raise their Collector troops to maturity, and the indoctrination process is probably also a pretty good education and training technique. And as you mention, the Reapers also have a substantially more advanced technological and scientific base to draw from. Having an organic race, or even all the organic races working together, create cloned Prothean soldiers over a much shorter time and with much fewer resources would be ... a strain on my suspension of disbelief.