Alright, skimming through one of the vsmp endings again, and I've expressed thoughts adjacent to this before, but I'm not sure if I've brought up this specific point (complaints about the ending below):
I really think part of the problem with how episode 8 ended up shaking out (for those of us who had problems with the ending, I should clarify) was the vampire side lost their primary aggressors: Owen and Pyro. Yes I know, Scott was willing to commit violence when necessary, but only if a) he was cornered, or b) knew he had the upper hand and would win. Otherwise that man pulled the charisma card or he ran. The main vampires taking risks and actively pursuing the town were the first two to leave the series (in that episode), and I think that just ground the momentum of the overall narrative to a halt.
When you take a look at the remaining vampires, it's not a surprise "team vampire" largely ceased to be a threat:
Cleo - non-aggressive, information was their weapon, which was largely irrelevant by this point (except finding the Final Plan, of course)
Apo - actively siding with the town, wanted that cure
Scott - see earlier statement
Shelby - spoke about being willing to kill the town, but largely did not initiate violence unless it was in self defense (in fact, her primary act of violence was taking out one of the main aggressors of the series)
Drift - I haven't seen her pov, but my understanding is she was largely following, not initiating
M - talked a big game, but it was largely so the vampires wouldn't turn on him, we know from his and Legs' pov he was trying to lay low
Legs - self explanatory, ready to kill Owen and die (though if he HADN'T come across the town who snapped him out of his rage, we could have had a very bloody and very fun fucked up ending on our hands)
At this point, to put it bluntly, the vampires weren't going to do jack shit. And yet, the town still couldn't take them out because the vampires abilities made them damn near impossible to trap and take out (unless they all started Veylocke murder box-ing everyone, which honestly, they should have, and I say this as someone who was on team vamp). I remember watching Scott's pov and thinking that it was turning into an endless cycle of trying to gain the upper hand, but ultimately running and retreating over and over again.
I think the series realistically was only going to end if one (or all) of these things happened:
the town started playing very dirty (which, I think they should have and had earned the right to do at that point)
the vampires started taking greater risks, switching from defense to offense and likely losing tiers, if not people entirely, as a result
time for betrayals - from who? i dunno, but make it dramatic and spicy
a magical Final Plan came about to stop the fighting and let the vampires + Abolish and Pearl leave (... and then Pearl stayed, which is fine, it's just... notable)
I also don't want to get too deep into theories on what was going on from a meta standpoint since we don't actually know for sure what was going down behind the scenes. That said, we DO know that while they did have a check-in to make sure everyone would be okay with The Plan being the final resolution of the series, a) they had been recording for hours at this point, and b) the series had been postponed a few weeks because of conventions and illnesses, resulting in it taking longer to complete. While they did say they had a a flexible total number of episodes for the series to run, people still had other projects to think about, as well as the holidays coming up (especially for the Americans, who had Thanksgiving right around the corner).
I'm getting off topic. Point is, the ending of vsmp lost momentum badly the moment the main aggressive vampires died, resulting in the overall narrative stalling out to the point things were becoming circular, and something had to change. I'm not surprised they went the route they did, but... man, I do think about canon divergent au's often for this reason.
