I agree with you and I don't think that the relays exploding as they did wasn't really well thought off. Now, I think the developers wanted to convey that everything related to the technology left behind by the reapers has to dissapear completely in order for the species to follow their own technological paths instead of those pre-ordained by the Reapers themselves, but the execution caused a bit of problems based on the Lore. 

Then again, I've taken the time to look closely at the differences between the Alpha Relay explosion scenes, and the ending Relays explosion scenes and there are quite some differences, but there's one I think it's the most important of all. When the asteroid hits the Alpha Relay, you see it destroying the rings that support the massive Eezo core and then the core itself undergoing a massive chain reaction that culminates into the nova itself; on the contrary, in the endings, the Eezo cores of the relays don't undergo a chain reaction, but instead you see the relays powering up massively and shooting the entire content of the core into a next Relay, like they do when a ship travels through them. When the Relays finally explode, there's no Eezo core in it, which undoubtly would have caused a far smaller explosion.

If it was EA's plan all along then unfortunately you are going to let them win and whether you would care or not with any other game, it still serves as a big time wake up call to all other developers out there. To think we don't like the idea of on disc DLC. This could be far worse and I wouldn't blame the devs for taking the chance we are so willing to give them.

I also doubt any DLC you get will solve the problem of your choices from ME1 and ME2 having little to no bearing on the ending in ME3.

Not to say you can't do what you want but I just caution everyone to think of the potential consequences of these actions, and all just for an ending to one video game.

I think EA knows that if they charge for the DLC many will complain, but on the other hand they also know that many will pay for it.

I am of the belief that EA will charge for it. If it were me I would too.

I totally support your idea of downloading a crack and a copy of the DLC ending though.

I do not know if this is 100% real, but I'll post it. Patrick Weeks, BioWare writer, is alleged to have posted on the Penny Arcade forums a post detailing how the ending came about, the post has been removed and it is claimed by BioWare that it did not originate from Weeks, however, the post did come from  Patrick Weeks'accound, Takyris, on the PA forums.

Here is the post:

I have nothing to do with the ending beyond a) having argued successfully a long time ago that we needed a chance to say goodbye to our squad, b) having argued successfully that Cortez shouldn’t automatically die in that shuttle crash, and c) having written Tali’s goodbye bit, as well as a couple of the holo-goodbyes for people I wrote (Mordin, Kasumi, Jack, etc).

No other writer did, either, except for our lead. This was entirely the work of our lead and Casey himself, sitting in a room and going through draft after draft.

And honestly, it kind of shows.

Every other mission in the game had to be held up to the rest of the writing team, and the writing team then picked it apart and made suggestions and pointed out the parts that made no sense. This mission? Casey and our lead deciding that they didn’t need to be peer-reviewe.d

And again, it shows.

If you’d asked me the themes of Mass Effect 3, I’d break them down as:

Galactic Alliances

Friends

Organics versus Synthetics

In my personal opinion, the first two got a perfunctory nod. We did get a goodbye to our friends, but it was in a scene that was divorced from the gameplay — a deliberate “nothing happens here” area with one turret thrown in for no reason I really understand, except possibly to obfuscate the “nothing happens here”-ness. The best missions in our game are the ones in which the gameplay and the narrative reinforce each other. The end of the Genophage campaign exemplifies that for me — every line of dialog is showing you both sides of the krogan, be they horrible brutes or proud warriors; the art shows both their bombed-out wasteland and the beautiful world they once had and could have again; the combat shows the terror of the Reapers as well as a blatant reminder of the rachni, which threatened the galaxy and had to be stopped by the krogan last time. Every line of code in that mission is on target with the overall message.

The endgame doesn’t have that. I wanted to see banshees attacking you, and then have asari gunships zoom in and blow them away. I wanted to see a wave of rachni ravagers come around a corner only to be met by a wall of krogan roaring a battle cry. Here’s the horror the Reapers inflicted upon each race, and here’s the army that you, Commander Shepard, made out of every race in the galaxy to fight them.

I personally thought that the Illusive Man conversation was about twice as long as it needed to be — something that I’ve been told in my peer reviews of my missions and made edits on, but again, this is a conversation no writer but the lead ever saw until it was already recorded. I did love Anderson’s goodbye.

For me, Anderson’s goodbye is where it ended. The stuff with the Catalyst just… You have to understand. Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he’s not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it.

And then, just to be a dick… what was SUPPOSED to happen was that, say you picked “Destroy the Reapers”. When you did that, the system was SUPPOSED to look at your score, and then you’d show a cutscene of Earth that was either:

a) Very high score: Earth obviously damaged, but woo victory

b) Medium score: Earth takes a bunch of damage from the Crucible activation. Like dropping a bomb on an already war-ravaged city. Uh, well, maybe not LIKE that as much as, uh, THAT.

c) Low score: Earth is a cinderblock, all life on it completely wiped out

I have NO IDEA why these different cutscenes aren’t in there. As far as I know, they were never cut. Maybe they were cut for budget reasons at the last minute. I don’t know. But holy crap, yeah, I can see how incredibly disappointing it’d be to hear of all the different ending possibilities and have it break down to “which color is stuff glowing?” Or maybe they ARE in, but they’re too subtle to really see obvious differences, and again, that’s… yeah.

Okay, that’s a lot to have written for something that’s gonna go away in an hour.

I still teared up at the ending myself, but really, I was tearing up for the quick flashbacks to old friends and the death of Anderson. I wasn’t tearing up over making a choice that, as it turned out, didn’t have enough cutscene differentiation on it.

And to be clear, I don’t even really wish Shepard had gotten a ride-off-into-sunset ending. I was honestly okay with Shepard sacrificing himself. I just expected it to be for something with more obvious differentiation, and a stronger tie to the core themes — all three of them. 

Source Gameranx, Gamerant. 

Since then, Mr. Weeks has gone on vacation, according to his Twitter.

You know you don't have to quote the entire post? It makes the thread harder to scroll.

The circle that spreads out is not an explosion but the thing that destroys, synthesis's or controls the Reapers. There's no way that was the explosion because that would mean there would be no life left in the galaxy at all because those energy circles are many hundreds of thousands of times bigger than solar systems.

But to reply to your quote of me above:

Regardless of when, how, where or what a dev says they are not to be trusted when they talk about their game. It really is that simple. Are they stupid heads for saying something like that so close to launch? Definitely. But you need to let that part go because Devs lie, it's part of the gaming cycle. 

Lestadark replied to the other part perfectly so I don't need to expand on that.

What composes the energy circles themselves is a mistery and one of the many things that trully baffled me in the ending (due to lack of explanation), but I don't think it's the same kind of energy released when the Alpha Relay was destroyed. It might be expanded Dark Energy since that's what basically composes the Crucible and that's what it releases in each ending, but anyone's guess is as good as any. 

Wait, wait. The Crucible releases Dark Energy? The stuff that shortens the lifespan of stars has just been spread across the galaxy? Where was this mentioned?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Microsoft have a policy of not allowing free DLC on Live?

Vendetta, the Protean VI, says that the Crucible is basically a giant generator of Dark Energy