This was a great write-up that provides a beautiful perspective on the manga. Thank for for your writing. Having read it, I can be a little satisfied with the ending. Here's to fifteen years of "everyday nudity".
Honestly, if we're being realistic, almost none of these girls end up together, that's just not how high school relationships work out. Most series get around this by focusing on a single couple/pairing, because while MOST people don't pair up for life out of high school, SOME people do, and the story can just be about one of those without stretching plausibility.
By making a series set in a girls school with so many pairings, relationships, and prospective relationships, you're left with the dilemma of either making an ending where many of the couples end up with long term prospects but it feels contrived and false, an ambiguous ending where you do a graduation arc and maybe a couple of them get together but mostly it's just leaving everything up in the air, or a time-skip/class reunion ending where you find out most of them broke up or never got together, and a lot of them married guys, and then it feels pretty shitty.
So while this feels on the face like a wildly unsatisfying last chapter, I could also sympathize with Kishi-sensei's decision to just go "eh fuck it the end." And at first that's what this looks like, but then I think about Honoka and Elisha's story, and I think there's something a little deeper going on here.
I think the reason he gave Honoka and Eli an ending specifically was because out of everybody, they had THE MOST to overcome if they were going to end up together, with Eli being an exchange student and leaving the country after a semester. Many of these couples have a whole year or two together before they graduate, many of them might attend the same college, and even if they don't, they're still all in the same country, they could end up at the same company, or find themselves in the same town, etc etc. But Eli and Honoka are going to have a literal ocean between them, and until the very end there it's kinda ambiguous if they're actually that committed or if they're just playing around. The fakeout in the ending where you start off thinking they fell out of touch works because honestly it would feel very real if they did. So the message here is:
"Look, we all know not all these girls are gonna get together, and I'm not going to dash your dreams by telling you which of your faves didn't work out. So instead of giving everybody an ending and deciding it for you, look, look here: The couple with the most obstacles is happily living together in quasi-marital bliss happily writing manga together, probably about Thomas Jefferson taking it in the butt from Tokugawa Ieharu. If they made it work, who's to say your favorite couple didn't?"
And y'know, I think that's probably about the best compromise between realism and narrative that you could probably do for a series like this.
