Yeah, and you can stop them from harvesting civilizations. Or, you could can stop them from harvesting civilizations and then use them to rebuild the current ones. Plus, would you really kill an innocent race out of spite for another?

" they spent a lot of time boasting about how hopeless the silly little organics were in trying to stop their cyclical genocide. " a big part of the reapers war strategy is psycological. Its more for intimidation than anything else. And once again, they're programmed to do that. " Sounds more like sadism and delusions of superiority than routine to me." the reapers are robots. None of those concepts mean anything to them. They likely don't even know of or understand them.



" And who's to say those....other endings DON'T eventually backfire somehow?" and who's to say they do? Control literally allows Shepard to control what the reapers do. Its kind of like he takes the place of the catalyst. The reapers can't go against him. The reapers see synthesis as an alternate solution to the harvest, so with everyone being both organic and synthetic, they have no reason to continue. Destroy simply has to many downsides to be a worthwhile option