Does anyone else think the Catalyst's explanation of the Reaper solution is lame as gooseberry fool? Synthetics and organics cannot coexist? Well, fine, only the prophean specifically structured their entire society to ensure they were never vulnerable to synthetics and prodceeded to anihilate any that appeared. Reapers still destroyed them anyway because...? Then in the next cycle Shepard brokers peace between synthetics and quarians, which stops a conflict that only ever took place because the organics behaved like dicks in the first place, not to mention it is shown that a lot of quarians fought with the geth before they were killed by thier own people. So really, you need to purge the entire galaxy to stop this organic life being erradicated permanently by synthetics? Sure as strawberry float doesn't seem like it.

You're spot on though, it doesn't make sense. For me, I think it's clear that stuff got changed. Like for one, does anyone remember the E3 Earth demo Casey Hudson they did for IGN? In that video Shepard and Anderson talk about how Cerberus are working WITH the Reapers. But in the final game Cerberus are very much working against them to control them. The ending we got just smacks of a very very late script change. Shepard could easily poke so many holes in the Reapers' reasoning for doing what they do it's untrue. It's the only reason i can think of for such a contradicting ending - especially when the vast majority of the game has a pretty good and engaging story.

How about this; what if all technology eventually developes to the point were species are capable of wiping out the entire galaxy by accident? The only way to solve this is to limit the development of technology to a certain point. The reapers harvest all advanced civilisations every cycle so no species ever becomes advanced enough to threaten the existence of the galaxy, uplifting them to a collective where no of them would have any reason to make war on each other on thus use said weapons. By harvesting in cycles the reapers prevent advanced civilisations from going to war with super weapons capable of destroying the galaxy and thus ensuring the continuation of life. Makes much more sense, right? If they are going to kill themsleves anyway, you might as well do it sooner and stop them from destroying all the younger races in the process. There's a chance that they would not use such weapons if they developed them, but why take that risk when you only need to be wrong once to jeopardise everything.

To hammer the point home, they could explain that the reapers come from another galaxy that was destroyed when they invented the technology, so the survivors fled to ours and decided to do their best to stop the same thing happening here.

I took Garrus with me in the final missions, yet he survived and was on the ship at the end got to say i was a little sad when it looked like the Normandy was going to explode, but it crashed and out popped Joker, my biatch (tali) and Garrus