If you hated the How I Met Your Mother finale, blame yourself, not the writers.

Yes, How I Met Your Mother should have ended a few years earlier, but the ending was always going to be the same. I mean, jesus, they filmed it 9 years ago, so the writers were always working towards the finale you all saw. get that? The mother was always going to  die and Ted was always going to end up with Robin. ALWAYS.

Feeling betrayed? That's your problem, not the show's. In fact, HIMYM was the un-Lost: it always knew it's ending and just took too long to get there while Lost had no fucking clue where it was going. In that light, yeah, blame HIMYM because they could've wrapped the whole thing up years ago. But again, blame yourself for watching the goddamn series when it sped downhill. Me? I stopped watching years ago and just tuned into the finale and you know what? I don't feel I missed a thing.

And anyone who thought the heart or tone of the show was different than what they experienced in that finale hasn't been paying attention.  Well, more likely they were reading things they wanted to be true into the show without recognizing that the bro-ness of the characters wasn't a veil hiding something deeper. Which bro-ness I found totally fine because the show created enough humor, and stumbled across the occasional insight into the human condition, I could forgive it that.

People hating on the finale apparently seem to have missed these simple basic facts about the show the whole time and are unable to forgive themselves, or the series creators, for that mistake.