On that note, I've noticed that difficulty gets skewed toward the end of the game. While I understand that this is the point, at the same time you've just about wrapped up the tech tree and have built just about everything that would be useful to you- now you're train-tracked through a dozen missions of invariable difficulty, with no time to catch a breath or partake of any sort of cathartic micromanagement element of game play. At this point, I feel like the game has lost its playability for me.
Just finished the game on normal. I thought the late game got too easy, especially with a squad of majors and colonels and guns that do 8-20 damage. Most aliens were dead before they could act, including the ethereals. The longest time an ethereal survived was when I got stuck in an ambush with 11+ muton elites, berserkers, and an ethereal controlling one of my colonels.. with my sniper positioned wrong.
I just rushed towards the finish in the post-hyperwave bit. Once you get two heavies with blasters, even taking on sectopods at a time is a cinch.
Ending was decent IMO, but I actually loved the endings of the UFO series (Aftermath/Aftershock/Afterlight). I think the ethereals are just too cocky and overconfident. They were used to subduing other races and having none of them fight back. And then when one actually survived and fought back, they were like... OMG, we succeeded! Oh... shit.
They didn't really comprehend that the humans would think themselves as superior instead of joining forces because of the thousands of years of being the best creatures in the universe.