I was more making the point that forces like Hepler are entirely why Bioware has turned into such a shitty company.
Don't let the existence of histrionic anti-fans distract from the point that they have, which is that the ending really was lousy by any objective metric
The real issue for me, beyond everything else, is how little sense everything makes. Nothing adds up. [spoiler]in the absolute best-case scenario, billions, possibly trillions of people die. There is no ending in which the Quarian and Turian forces around Earth survive, for example. Arrival established that mass relays extinguish all life in a system, because they go supernova when they blow - so how did anyone survive, save for Joker and the crew of the Normandy, who just happened to outrun the explosion and make it to a system without a mass relay? And what's the implication here, Joker and the crew populate an entire world and the post-credit followup was descendants of the Normandy. Except, there's not enough genetic diversity on the Normandy to repopulate a planet.
You have to suspend disbelief and swallow a lot of bullshit in Mass Effect already. (for example: how do the Asari not have a larger population than Humans despite having lifespans about 18x longer? WHY IS THERE MEDIGEL ON THE GETH DREADNOUGHT? FOR THAT MATTER, WHY DOES MEDIGEL HEAL EDI?) But that's all something that comes with playing a game. I mean, they're telling a space opera so you can't expect hard science fiction - however, that does not excuse an ending that basically ignores everything that happened before it for the sake of unsatisfying narrative. The ending simply has plot holes a mile wide that are absolutely impossible to ignore if you were paying attention. What the fuck, Bioware? How does this happen in a game series which pays so much fucking attention to detail?
I'm also pretty peeved that they basically just took Human Revolution's ending and slapped an RGB coat of paint on it. The ending was the shittiest part of Human Revolution by far, but at least it made contextual sense.[/spoiler]
On the one hand I agree that the entire game up until the ending sort of IS the ending we were all hoping for. The problem is that that stops.
The problem with that is the ending invalidates everything you did prior to that point. Shepard waking up on the Normandy 1 and Nihilus saying "Hey, Eden Prime just sent a message, apparently their comms went out!" and it turning out to have all been a dream wouldn't have been any less satisfying.