Destroy ending

Shepard is on the Citadel during the breath scene

Earth. The concrete slabs in the background, wind howling, rebar, and the angle which the camera pans suggests you are found on a hill of sorts. The hill when you were running towards the beam would be telling.

[Apologies in advance for my wall of text]

JAM is better than MEHEM.  Cuts out a lot of unnecessary stuff, including added voice acting. 

Destroy is the best option to remove even a hint of potential Reaper threat.  They're so overwhelmingly powerful that there's no reason to assume they might not find other reasons to try to dominate the lesser races.  I just don't trust them.  That's not even touching on the Revenge aspect for the countless (by which I mean the number exceeds what can be calculated) deaths they've caused over the last billion years.  I've tried to come up with a number (1 billion / 50,000 years = 20,000 cycles) x (number of sentients in each cycle, which has to be in the trillions, if not more).  Do you have a real concept of how many deaths they caused?  Then the horror of turning people into some form or other into husks and liquefying entire races to make a new Reaper.  To be, that's unforgivable and no amount of synthesizing would change my own desire for vengeance over the deaths in the current cycle alone.  I doubt there's a single being alive who didn't lose a parent, child, sibling, friend, etc. 

Control is creepy.  Not sure I can trust a Shepard with unlimited power no matter how good the intentions.  Remember, Shepard could potentially have made a lot of Renegade choices, including killing off the rachni and krogan.  Could you really trust a Shepified Catalyst/Reaper to not do something similar if there's a perceived threat?  Not to mention these things that were just attempting to annihilate us standing watch.  No, I wouldn't like that.

Synthesis?  Ugh.  Too much like a fairy tale of "happily ever after".  Have to assume the Catalyst was lying here because it said "the final end of evolution".  We all know evolution only ends with death.  Read into that what you will.  They kind of remind me of husks.  Are husks (banshees, cannibals, etc) alive?

Refuse.  Well, I think removing all life in the galaxy is a poor choice.

As far as the geth go, it looks to me like the made some poor choices.  I wonder if you can really even call them geth anymore.  The geth were a consensus, not individuals.  Once you change that, they've evolved significantly to be another race entirely.  Do they deserve to die?  Probably not.  Is that death a consequence of their decision to incorporate Reaper Tech into them?  Yes.  I'm only sad about EDI but she made it clear she was quite willing to die to stop the Reapers.  So was everyone who fought them.  That scene on Earth was when I saw her truly come alive. "But they have destroyed this one.  Nor will they."  She also mentions that Shepard's influence changed things for her, made her in that moment fully alive for the first time.  EDI had been evolving ever since Joker freed her but she only really became human in that moment.  And for all that, she was willing to fight to the death.  She had no choice in having Reaper tech as a part of her, from her original creation (TIM combined the rogue VI with leftovers of Sovereign) to assuming Dr. Eva's body.  Yet, she wasn't afraid to fight side-by-side with humans to fight Reaper forces.  She was my regret, just as I regretted Thane and Mordin's deaths. Sacrifice is what it's all about.  The geth weren't willing to do so, really only having their own interests in mind.

So, yeah, Destroy all the way.  I know others argue that other endings are better but I can't tolerate them.  I think I could have saved the geth consensus - the ones who were wronged by the quarians - but not the Reaper upgraded version of geth.

That's my viewpoint.  I'm curious to hear what choices you made and why.  Sometimes it's illuminating to hear other viewpoints, even if I don't agree with them.

As ONE possible ending to the game, it works.  All of the endings were constructed with significant downsides.  Bioware wanted us to think about consequences.  It is constructed as a moral dilemma that offers no perfect solution.

I do take issue with people who want it to be the only possible ending to the game.  They want to take away people's ability to choose the others and, in so doing, contemplate the consequences of each... so they march around trumping it as the "good" ending.  They lose sight of ME being a "morality game" not a game where right and wrong is supposed to just be told to us.