@themedianerd

Bioware screwed up with ME3 for several reasons. The first being that there was simply no need to explain the origin of the Reapers; nothing they came up with was going to live up to the speech given by Sovereign in Mass Effect 1, so they should have just left it a mystery. After all, we didn't need to know why they did what they did, only how we could stop them. There was a draft for a Dark Energy related arc which was IMO better than the Synthetics vs. Organics nonsense they pulled out at the last second, but they could have just left little hints to both ideas without explaining the Reaper motivation, and left us with a fun mystery for the fandom to debate.

The other problem was that someone clearly forced multiple endings in at the last moment, and we ended up with the Deus Ex style "all the endings are bad" option, except that personally I like how Deus Ex does it. I don't think anyone would have complained about a single ending, after all we all expected it to involve defeating the Reapers in some way. What was important for people was having their actions reflected in the ending, e.g - seeing your recovered assets and allies show up to help, and fighting alongside some of them in the final battle, along with all your party members (old and new). No-one would have complained about that (okay, well someone would, some people always do). They had all the elements for a great ending in the ME2 style; Shepard sacrifices themselves to save the galaxy from the Reapers for good, party members are lost etc., unless your galactic readiness was as high as possible, then your party members would survive and Shepard might.

As it is the only way to endure the ME3 ending is to pick Destroy, which seems to be the "correct" ending, and just ignore the fact that the Star Child was even in the game. Just pretend Shepard triggered the Crucible but was (maybe) killed in the process, the end.

For the next Mass Effect game I'm hoping for something with smaller, but more personal stakes. My vote would be for playing as a C-Sec officer on the Citadel, sometime during Shepard's absence at the start of ME2. This gives plenty of scope for bumping into fan favourites as a new character, gives us scope to play as different species, and gives us a chance to actually see more of the Citadel. I'd actually like to be able to roam around a big chunk of the Citadel, maybe even with free-roaming elements, unlocking new areas etc. Have the story centre around some seemingly unrelated investigations, throw in a troublesome Spectre who may or may not be rogue, and have it all come together into a bigger plot. I'd buy it.