Who has completed a low-ems playthrough?

I did with my renegade Shep. I hated it at first but I'm glad I stuck with it. It was heartbreaking. He lost his ex Miranda on horizon, then found another ex Jack at the Cerberus base and had to kill her.
When he got to Earth the whole tone of the game was different to normal and I appreciated that, the forces seemed more overwhelmed and less likely to win.

I forgot about the beam, so took his LI Ash and bestie Javik only to have them killed in front of him. He let Anderson die and sat there dejected in silence for an eternity. When he went up to the kid he lost it, shooting at him. Refusal it was, everyone died, and it....fitted somehow. It was powerful.

He'd spent the game being selfish, not aiding the students or Krogan, disliking aliens, and the result was the end of the world.

You don't have to romance anyone when completing a low ems run. Or take your LI on the beam run. That's one thing I can say I've never done. Taken my LI on the beam run during a low ems playthrough. The majority of my low ems runs I had James and Ashley with me on the beam run.

I could.  But does the Normandy survive a low EMS PT?  I thought the Normandy crashed on the garden planet and no one came out.

Maybe.  A significant number of Protheans survived the initial Reaper invasion.  It was Vigil that took them offline.  Still, I'd have to assume anyone at the forefront of the war ended up dead.   I don't think I could choose Refusal for in-game reasons.  I have no reason to believe that Liara's beacons would have any impact, or would even survive.  Why risk a continued cycle on a slim chance?  No, I choose MEHEM.  It's the only option for me.  (Though I did try a Control ending recently and found it horribly depressing.)

Yes the door does move a bit with low ems and destroy chosen. My guess is Joker dies as he hits the open door button.

If ems is below 2600, the ship suffers a lot of damage stranding the occupants on the unknown planet for however long.

... and yet that same ship is as notably damaged when it crashed on the Collector base (not to even mention the gaping holes in the cargo bay drilled by the occulus before it crashed) and it still was able to be repaired enough to fly back through the Omega 4 relay during the time it took for Shepard to complete just one mission.

So, imagine this... Normandy is not alone in the skies fleeing the wave.  It's part of a massive fleet of ships who are also fleeing the scene.  There is a chance, then, that numerous other ships also crashed on the same planet.  We're just not shown them in the "artistic" cinematic of the event.  You can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic... Bioware left it open.

I'm with themikefest on this one. I can't see how the people on the Normandy survived.

I was not happy about the dependency on EMS for outcome in my first run. However, as I guessed it was going to be important to get it as high as possible I made a point of completing as much as I could. What really annoyed me was the fact that readiness could never be above 50% unless you did multi-player. Not knowing this in advance, I assumed 50% was as high as it could go. I thought having a 50/50 chance of success seemed reasonable odds so headed for earth. This was before the Extended Cut.

Then after experiencing the whole confusing ending, I came to the boards to see if I could get some light thrown on it and discovered that on high EMS destroy Shepard can be implied to have survived. I was puzzled. I thought I had done every mission that could be done, plus loads of planet scanning, so I didn't see how my EMS could be any higher or my readiness. A friend, who did multi-player, then told me this was what determined if you got the breath scene. Initially it would seem a reward given to people who did multi-player. Thankfully they corrected that with the Extended Cut.

I think I would have found it virtually impossible to get a low EMS ending. As I completed previous games with all my companions surviving (except Virmire) and had the requisites in place for optimum outcomes, I would definitely have had to ignore everything except main quests in ME3 to even remotely have a chance. To be honest, though, I don't really see the point. Clearly the negative outcomes of low EMS are there basically to punish players who just want to storm through ignoring much of the content or reward players who deliberately like have bad outcomes. I fall into neither categorically. I played ME because I wanted to save the galaxy from the Reapers with a few negative consequences as possible.

Would you agree that since Adams name is not on the memorial wall, he survived?

The same for Ken and Gabby and Chakwas/Michel. Of course their names, minus Michel, do show up if they died in ME2.

It would be safe to say all named characters did survive, and since the only name/s that was added to the wall,  since the last time I checked, after completing Cronos, is Anderson and possibly Shepard, that all onboard survived.