I liked the original ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'm not, however, going to claim that it's a good ending. In fact, even though NGE is one of my favorite works of dramatic fiction of all time, in all honesty, it has some pretty serious flaws (one of them the ending).
However, here's why I liked it: it did a good job resolving the character arcs. No, we don't get to see what actually happens in the real world (for that, we have EoE). It leaves the giant-robots-beating-the-shit-out-of-trippy-monsters element out by the side of the road, but that's not why I loved NGE so much. If your primary concern with NGE is the robots vs angels element, in my opinion, you're not watching the right show. I loved the action arc, but even though it's masterfully done, it serves primarily as a lead in to the rest of the series. As a resolution to that, the ending really does suck. However, as you all know, they didn't have enough money to give the story a proper ending and properly resolve the character arcs. Given a choice between the two, they chose exactly right.
Which leads to the next point: yes, the ending is cheaply animated. It's a lot of still frames, sketches, and montage. And you know what? In my opinion, that's all they needed, because it works. It takes Eisenstein's montage theory of building images on top of each other to create an overall thematic picture, and does some really cool and creative stuff with it. Tsurumaki and Anno are both masters at framing shots and building sequences in a way that - at least to me - was quite visceral.
Of course, there's the flawed pseudo-philosophical existentialism, but that really wasn't such a big roadblock for me. There is a philosophical message in Evangelion, but it's about the human condition and how we see ourselves and interact with each other, not any of the poorly constructed stuff in the ending that, taken out of context, one might believe the ending to be about.
In case I haven't stated my position clearly enough, I like the ending, but it isn't in and of itself "deep stuff" for the reason people seem to think it is. The people who hear the "deep stuff" as nonsense are right: it is nonsense. That's not to say, however, that the ending, along with NGE as a whole, don't say some pretty deep things.
I also don't get where all the talk about religious symbolism comes from. The religious symbolism doesn't exist. It looks cool; it's a visual motif, just like we use greek and other classical religions as motifs all the time. Anno, Sadamoto, and Tsurumaki all said so.
That said, someone (specifically Zac Bertschy, on ANNcast) once raised the point that a show about building robots to challenge the judeo-christian god would be pretty epic. I'm inclined to agree.
Anyway, I'm not trying to convince the people who didn't like the ending to like it, or even to convince people that it's even a good ending, but I hope I've explained well enough why I personally loved every last second of it.
TL;DR: I loved it, other people don't; we both have good reasons...but I'm still right ^_^
PS: On the other hand, I do have problems with EoE, but that's neither here nor there. Either way, I can't wait for Rebuild 3.0 and 4.0.
