Uh?! 
What did I miss? You go to cydonia (or the.. whatever the name of that big ship is in the remake), kill the big brain (or the big ethereal) and come home, finish off the stragglers and everybody's happy unless the fish learn how to breathe. No?
It not like that. You destroy the ship, you theoritically dont know what happened to the valunteer (the only other being in the galaxy to have reached etherial level psionics), the strike force returns to x-com base and....thats it. No cydonia, what happens to the rest of the alliens, what happens to earth as a whole because this time around they were awhare of the alien invasion from the start and the aftermath of the invasion, everything is a cliffhunger (theoritically).
Ugh, now I remember why I never bothered to finish NuXCOM - railroading a "one true way" of playing the game plus a retarded attempt to tell a convoluted and shallow story when it wasn't necessary.
That said, Long War and Enemy Within made the game tolerable for me. Though it's a shame it took a free mod, and a DLC with stuff that should've already been included in 2012, to do this.
Havent played long war, but what did enemy within do storywise to make things better? I didnt find the story convulted at all to be honest. In fact for me it was more clarified than the original, because it "served" you the "conclusion" fully in the end when the etherial spoke to you. Unlike the original where you got it bit by bit and had to do much thinking. The only thing left unanswerd in the 2012 version is weather there is another entity above the etherials or not.
Solomon has stated that the Volunteer doesn't die at the end sequence but added nothing about what happened to him when the Temple Ship was destroyed.
My opinion is that the Temple Ship was both a test and a trap, for the aliens to capture a human specimen if they proved the special species that they were looking for.
How much you wanna bet that he/she "ascended"?
