How bad was the original ending of Mass Effect 3?

The ending is still a train wreck but the original ending was truly atrocious. A choose your suicide palette swap coupled with a stupid garden of eden sequence.
The extended cut provided some of the basic fixes though it refuses to address the fundamental problems. Epilogue slides added, what a crazy expectation at the end of a trilogy. It’s still a very sticking plaster over a gaping sore. Teleporting squaddies, let’s create an even stupider sequence of the Normandy landing in the beam run etc.

It's the same turd sandwich endings, but with sprinkles added.

The answer is obvious: Defeating the Starchild should not be the same as continuing the cycles. That was the last thing people wanted. So yes, that is a middle finger to the fans.

I've never chosen refuse. Have no reason to not make a choice. 

Shepard. For a moment Shepard talks big, but then stands there like a dumba** doing nothing except watching the reapers destroy the fleets. 

Thing changes it's voice to sound like Harbinger. SO BE IT!!! It's a thing. Why would it be upset about that? Instead it comes across as a little kid crying because mommy didn't put any whip cream on top of their cake.

The dialogue from the female voice telling the story to the child. The female says they fought a great war so we wouldn't have to. Child replies with, Is that why we have peace?. If what she says is true, the crucible was used before the reapers entered the galaxy. So someone finds this time capsule, listens to it, then decides to bring it to his/her leaders who decide hey, lets build this thing that will stop these reaper things. When on the Citadel talking with thing, was there more than one organic? If there was more than one, which decided to be the one to take one for the team to choose the blue green? I would be surprised if one of them laughed at the nonsense thing was saying about the green. In the case of red, they likely would fire at the tube from a distance instead of having someone get up and close to it. Did thing tell them about the organic who could have ended the war, but chose not to? I wouldn't be surprised if they would think our cycle was filled with a bunch of dumba**es for not doing anything.

Then there's Liara. If the story is being told from what t'soni says in the capsule, then how does she know, with great detail, what happened after Shepard went up the beam especially if she's killed by Harbinger? Why is she telling Shepard's story? She wasn't around for the whole trilogy especially in ME2. 

One thing I'm curious about with refuse is Shepard. Did Shepard end up dying on the Citadel or did someone come by to rescue him/her, then Shepard is healed to fight the reapers to the end?

I don't agree with folks saying it was flipping the bird at fans. If there's any bird flipping going on it was towards the ME2 characters for the way they were handled in ME3.

Because it's Shepard allowing genocide to continue without any certainty that the next cycle could defeat the Reapers. It's the whole "gnawing your arm off to escape a trap", except this is on a galaxy-wide scale where Shepard gnaws off the galaxy to [maybe] escape the Reaper trap.

What irratated me is that they did absloutely nothing with the breath scene. Yes I know it means shepard lives but give me something! Even if they just did what MEHEM did where it shows him looking at the memorial wall at the end that would have been something. The only time a breath scene like that is close to okay is when that is the ending of something and you plan on a sequel. In other words you don't do it at the end of the trilogy when you have no plan of having us learn more. Oh and it is okay in some horror movies when showing that the monster is still alive.

Now this is interesting:
www.pcgamesn.com/mass-effect-3/ending-mass-effect-4

“Basically, it involved luring the Reapers through the Mass Relays then detonating the entire network to wipe them out, but also destroying/damaging the relays, and isolating every galactic community from the others."

This is the sort of ending I actually expected. Especially given how the relay network was in fact a reaper trap designed to make the galaxy reliant on Reaper technology and keep them complacent, unwilling to look for alternatives.

And a galaxy that has spent years, decades, perhaps centuries isolated from each other, developing in who-knows-what kinds of ways, could have been a really cool reset of the Milky way (rather than fleeing to Andromeda like a plague of locusts that have already destroyed one field)

The biggest WTF came when the Destroy Ending did just that, it was just a matter of using player saves to determine how fast the galaxy rebuilt and how it would do so which will likely be the plot of the next game. MEA was good, but needed better direction and care.

Given that we've heard the galaxy isn't in such good shape in ME4, we'd either have low EMS ending (which would kill Shepard and the crew) or this new ending which does impact the galaxy negatively (except the obvious positive of no more Reapers) but still leave the Normandy crew intact. And I guess EDI and the geth.

They pretty much have to. They screwed up with the ending, especially going in knowing that there was going to be a fourth game but leaving things so that it wasn't possible to continue. This is a good workaround.