See to me the Ending was hollow. Based on what you said it's not even worth the time to play the Extended version. I like Mass Effect 2 ending more because the choices you made in the finally really determined weather you and your friends died and if you took sides with Cerberus or not. And to some degree it was very randomized. In other words Mass Effect 3 let you choose your ending A, B, C (which totally defeats the purpose of seeing the ripple effect of your actions). While Mass Effect 2's ending was more based on a combination of earlier choices and it forced you down a unique path based on those choices.

Yes, mass effect 3 really dropped the ball. Considering how it was the culmination of what was a fleshed out story across all three games. I liked mass effect 3, but the ending is piss poor. I'm glad though, they got rid of scanning planets for resource in mass effect 2. That got very tedious.

Many parts of the Mass Effect 3 Story were great, the game-play was solid but as you said the Ending was tacked on. It was like they couldn't figure out how to nail it again like they did with ME2. Thus I feel they put too much man hours in Multi-player when they should have had people working on the ending more! PS: Scanning planets in ME2 never bothered me as it was relaxing to me and had no factor on messing up the story. Plus they patched the mining quite a bit so that Mining took less time when I got the Game on PC and PS3. ME3 Ending rather did bother me a ton as ultimately it ruined the story.

TBH my biggest disappointment was not having a geth teammate. Legion is by far and away my favourite squad member. Also felt like so much of the game was cut out, given how few team mates you have and all the empty spaces on the normandy.

Yeah I noticed that too. IT felt rushed. They should have spent another year working on it. OR dismissed the Muti-player so that the Single player would have had better quality story and interactions.