After some discussion (and a bottle of good whisky shared) with my friend working at BMW in Munich I finally understand better why 2GC is so ugly and FWD.
In short, delivering a car to the market that has better looks and/or traction (lower weight would add to that) than the 3-series could cannibalize this mainstream model sales.
So to avoid it and still try to fish for new customers coming from other front-wheel-drive market offerings, they made it FWD and went with a design that makes sure any real BMW fan(atic) won't even look at this car. It's rather a product for our sons and daughters, than for us