User blog comment:Bluegear93/Mass Effect 3's ending, something came to my mind./@comment-98.165.21.51-20120528044842/@comment-1388547-20120528064904

Perhaps there were time and money problems, and he felt the rest of the development team would react badly to what he thought he needed to do to bring the game in on budget? There are certainly other parts of the game that feel like they didn't get enough work put into them, despite about the same amount of development time passing from ME2 to ME3 as passed from ME1 to ME2, the similarity of ME3 to ME2 (ME2 was a thorough revamp of much of the game mechanics, while ME3 was just a refinement), and the generally higher quality of ME2.

The more I think about this, the more it starts to smell like a budget, staffing, or scheduling problem, exacerbated by losing key personnel such as Drew Karpyshyn. Either there was some kind of horrible train wreck in the scheduling, or for some reason they just didn't have the staff they needed to properly build the game.