No, it wasn't.
It was the climax of a trilogy. It was something big. There were a lot of ways to handle that.
What we ended up with was a completely out of left field villain who had never even been hinted at previously, and an incomplete ending (which is why they had to go back and patch in the extended ending later on). The ending was so bad that a very credible and popular theory was advanced that Shepard was actually indoctrinated during the ending.
Think about that for a minute. At the end of the trilogy, a very large chunk of the fanbase thought that Shepard secretly being brainwashed and crazy made more sense than what we were shown.
I'm pretty confident that the *only* reason the writers included the "Destroy option means killing off your robotic allies, including one of your fellow shipmates" bit is because otherwise 99% of the playerbase would have happily wiped out the Reapers without batting an eyelash. That was, after all, what you'd been fighting to achieve ever since roughly halfway through the first game. And the writers' contempt for the players and their opinions showed up in the extended ending release, when the writers changed one thing about the decision making process. Quite a few players were very pissed off about the "out of left field, who the Hell is ghost boy!?" thing, and emptied their pistol into him before making their forced and stupidly contrived decision. So Bioware patched in a little bit that had shooting Ghost Boy automatically cause you to take the "I do nothing" choice.
Complaining about Bioware's ham-handed ending? We can't have players voicing their opinions on crappy writing!
That contempt also came through somewhat on the official forums when players first started finishing the game. The complaints were very loud and noisy at that point from the players (as noted, both due to the utterly out of left field nature of Ghost Boy, as well as the fact that large chunks of the ending were blatantly missing). And the response to this overwhelming tidal wave of complaints was to essentially gloss the whole thing over and insist that the ending was the most amazing thing ever. And players had no clue what they were talking about.
There's actually a conversation released with the game (I'm not sure if you can actually get it to play in the game or not, though; it's on YouTube) between Anderson and Shepard after the Illusive Man is killed, in which Anderson talks about what an amazing parent Shepard would be. The placement of the conversation in the overall storyline (i.e. literally *just* before the end) seems to strongly hint that a much more survivable ending was originally planned for Shepard, but there was a change at the last minute. That theory also seems to be justified by the fact that at least half - if not more - of the sequences for the ending (as revealed in the eventual ending DLC fix) were absent from the original game release. Best guess is that the ending was completely rewritten at the last minute, and there wasn't enough time to finish the new cinematics before the game was released. So we ended up with truncated placeholders until the cinematics could be finished and released as the fix DLC.
I'll play anything by BioWare.
