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Good post. But I think you're off base when it comes to why people don't like ME3. It isn't because the ending is a dire stakes, Hail Mary play which has a huge cost for the galaxy. No, it's because the ending a) is the culmination of a plot that existed only in ME3 and is retarded anyway, b) it gives you a decision that has nothing at all to do with what came before, and c) it makes no sense with the previous rules of the setting anyway.
First, the Crucible. This partly comes down to that you said about how the writers didn't have a plan for the trilogy (more accurately: they had a tentative plan, but the writer in charge left/got kicked off the project and his ideas got rejected so they threw out the plot threads they had built). But they don't get a pass for that. So the Crucible never gets mentioned until ME3, and players quite reasonably go "wait what" when the plan to stop the Reapers is something they've never heard of before. But even if the writers had brought it up sooner... it's retarded. There is no way in hell that you could have a tech project where every Reaper cycle progresses it a little bit further. The researchers of all these different species wouldn't even be able to understand what came before (remember: Shepard is literally the only one in the galaxy who can speak Prothean, no way a research team is going to be able to decipher Prothean blueprints), not to mention the fact that it's going to be nigh impossible to do tech development while in the midst of a galactic genocide, not to mention that it's going to be nigh impossible to keep it secret every single cycle so that the Reapers never discover it. So even if they had started to build up the Crucible earlier, it's a bad idea.
Then we have the continuity with what came before. Your previous choices don't matter to the Star Child. It's not the natural consequence of the rest of the game's narrative. It's this completely separate thing tacked onto the end which has no relation at all to your adventures with your space homies. People want the ending to come from somewhere, especially in a series which prides itself on being responsive to player choice, and this didn't.
But even if the ending had related to what came before, it would still suck because it disregards the rules of the setting. First of all, the supposed reason that the Reapers kill everyone is... because otherwise organic and inorganic life will kill each other and the Reapers would rather cull the universe every so often than have a dead universe. But that makes no sense. The game shows you, time and again, that organics and inorganics can learn to get along. It's not easy (as with any people who have tension), but it is possible. Legion and Tali learn to get along and respect each other. Joker is banging your ship. It's clearly possible for the two sides to get along, but the game contradicts itself and says "no it's not"without any evidence to support that. Then you have the mass relays blowing up. In the Arrival DLC for ME2, we are told that such an explosion is so violent that it would kill everyone in the system. And yet, at the end your people land on a planet which is pretty close to a mass relay, but they... somehow survive the cataclysmic explosion. The ending is simply not playing by the rules of the setting on multiple levels.
One very common criticism leveled at ME fans at the time ME3 came out was "you just want a happy ending". But that isn't what people really wanted. They wanted an ending that made some semblance of narrative sense, and which cohered with the things that came up to that point in the series. The ME3 ending did neither of those things, which was the real problem.
I just want to say I agree with you much more than I would quibble, and fully confess to moving past the ending specifically because I wanted to address the thematic alignment and how the 'punish the player' trope in earlier parts made the story thematically work better than the issues with the ending itself.
Which, as you demonstrated, is a load more text, lol.
That said, there were more than a small number of players who were more upset about the end of their power fantasy than the writing rigour. Mass Effect was always pretty squishy on the writing rigour, and this was well apparent even in ME2. For a lot of people, arguments like your above- which I agree with!- were excuses to justify/validate how they felt... when they were acting far more akin to scorned lovers. Hence how one of the 'fixes' of the post-ending fracas was the medical evac goodbye scene at the finish line.
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