The melancholy "he saved the world for all but himself" trope is so overdone. It felt like Paolini had a certain ending in mind and fought against his own worldbuilding to get there. It did not have to end that way. And the meaninglessness made the less-than-happy ending that much more unbearable. I'll admit that I'm biased toward happy endings. I'm a hopeless romantic. But I can still appreciate a melancholy ending if it's narratively satisfying. Paolini tried to do that, but he failed to convince me that it was the only solution so it fell flat.

I did find a nice fanfic alt ending. Reads like fanfic - dialog voice isn't quite right and development is somewhat lacking, but the plot is so much better and more believable than the original, especially if you read between the lines and make the connections that the fanfic author fails to make explicitly: m.fanfiction.net/s/7558100/1/