I never hated the ending of Mass Effect 3 when it came out as much as most people did. Or at least I wasn't surprised by it. Let me explain. See the thing is, Mass Effect is, at it's root, cosmic horror. The Reapers are Lovecraftian with a paint of sci-fi. This is most obvious is Mass Effect 1 when you first talk to Sovereign and realize just what kind of story you are in. And the thing about cosmic horror is you don't win through fighting. No one wins a war against Cthulhu, and if they do, it's because they weren't really in a cosmic horror story. So the options for Mass Effect 3 were always either 1) all pretense of cosmic horror is abandoned and we beat the reapers through combined guile and military force or b) some semblance of cosmic horror is maintained, and the route to beating the reapers is an outside context solution. Some might call it a deus ex machina. So from that standpoint, the overall 'kind' of resolution that we got in Mass Effect 3 was more or less what I expected. Now I think it's perfectly fair to criticize execution, and the replies to this will entirely be people who didn't read my post and just want to talk about how bad color coded endings suck (btw, I think if the endings hadn't been associated with a color public opinion of them would be higher. Possibly a hotter take than the rest of the post) But there you have it. Genre dictated the 'kind' of ending the series had. Mass Effect isn't Halo. It's not Mil-Scifi. A purely military victory would have been a betrayal of genre.