It's exactly and precisely mine. Why not?
I never watched the finale as the penultimate episode violated my sense of right and wrong on a profound level. You do not have the keys to reality and make a decision on behalf of all humanity to consign us to a virtual reality with only suicide as the way out. The real world is important. Real struggle against, and with, reality, nature and not just our fellow humans.
As someone else wrote on Reddit back then, the show's ending is profoundly nihilistic.
This is one of the reasons I've never got really into programming. It was fun dabbling in intro courses, but I went into the sciences (specifically biology) to discover the natural world, not a human generated system.
“Suicide is the only way out”, “there’s only one flavor of heaven” and other such contrived flaws are just that - storytelling contrivances. Because an actual heaven / freedom-simulation would literally be “everyone lived happily ever after (or for only a few decades after, if they insisted), each according to their own free beliefs and desires and choices, and there just was no catch, the end”.
If your objection is that you want living beings to be stranded in our cruel and uncaring base reality whether they like it or not, because of some philosophical quibble about a difference between “simulation” vs “reality” that you wouldn’t be able to discern with your thoughts or five senses…well, that’s far more abhorrent to me.
And "simulation", at all, is the problem, for me. That is the ultimate and total catch. If I was born in a simulation I would still want to know about the simulation I was born in, as well as whatever I could find out and do to access, explore, and manipulate the above world which is creating my simulation. I wouldn't want to go deeper into a nested simulation, so far removed from reality. The mere thought of this is hugely anxiety and sadness provoking.
They had access to the multi-dimensional time-knife in the IHOP. And were so scared of both they swore both off forever. A fundamental part of reality that they turned their backs on. That is a part of reality I'd, personally, like to get a handle on. But I can't, because they decided that future humans wouldn't have access to this part of reality. We'd be consigned only to simulated environments.
This is not a philosophical quibble. This is a "quibble" on the fundamental purpose of (my) life. And a "quibble" on the use of power to constrain the drives of others over the personal preference of the constrainer. I don't want a god making decisions for me. I want any constraints to be an argument between humans, not an imposed condition by a (temporarily) omnipotent power.
The actual "Matrix" Matrix was objectively better than living in the real world of the Matrix. Yet Neo chose reality over simulation, as did most of the others in Zion. Likewise knowing they were in a simulation was incredibly depressing for the folks in "The Thirteenth Floor", and leaving the simulation was freeing.
> “everyone lived happily ever after (or for only a few decades after, if they insisted), each according to their own free beliefs and desires and choices, and there just was no catch, the end”
The Atlantic article I linked addressed this point. In a society there is always a catch to deciding not to exist. The catch is the impact of this decision on other people, and on one's personal valuing of selves, in general.
"These characters have spun webs of interdependent relationships based on love, trust, and generosity. Then they snip those webs because they’ve reached some sense of internal “completion” that is individualistic even though it relied upon them working with others to achieve it. Beautiful relationships do not turn out to provide unending nourishment; the pain caused to those left behind does not outweigh the prerogative to leave."
But that doesn't seem to be what you were, or are, saying. If you issue is specifically with "an epicurean theme park of enlightenment and joy to span the stars", and not with the dramatized reaction to (against) it, then...I must say I still don't understand what the problem is. An experience which is _definitionally_ pleasant, fulfilling, and non-harmful (to self or others) is....well, it's capital-g Good, no?
> The real world is important. Real struggle against, and with, reality, nature and not just our fellow humans.
What is it about the real world that is more important, inherently, than "the experiences that arise from living in it"? If a "better" (I'm hand-waving the complexity of comparison, because it's assumed as part of the discussion) set of experiences can arise - with perfect certainty, no trade-offs, no utilitarian cheats, just "everything is better for everyone" - then, as the other commenter said, it would be abhorrent to deny it 'because of some philosophical quibble about a difference between “simulation” vs “reality”'.