TBH, I think TNE did it the best way possible.
Like you said, you can't really just say "a miracle happens" and everything's back to normal again. And the "it was only a dream" response would have been just lame and tacky (though it works for GT since the whole point of GT is that MT/TNE never happened)
I could only really see two ways for it to go, both of which involve the destruction of the 3I.
One is that the Hard Times continue until everyone's completely exhausted. Death by attrition, in other words. Everything collapses, but there's no "killer blow" of secret weapons or Virus or anything else - there's just nobody left to fight anymore. The industrial and tech base is destroyed, nobody's got the gumption or inclination to keep the fighting going. After that, you get another Long Night and lots of pocket empires while people turn inwards and try to survive, and eventually something new will rise from the ashes.
The other is the "killer blow", which is what TNE did. In this, the Hard Times continue, but someone gets stupid and unleashes a "Final Weapon" that brings the teetering edifice crashing down very rapidly. The end result is pretty much the same as TNE - there are long-lasting consequences of the Final Weapon (i.e. vampire fleets, collapse of technology etc), but eventually they are surmounted and new polities rise from the ashes.
In both cases, there's no more 3I, but there's simply no way to avoid that. There HAS to be a Collapse Period after Hard Times either way before people can recover. Either way, peoples' "precious Imperium" is swept away, either slowly-and-painfully or quickly-and-painfully. Personally I think the Virus/Final Weapon approach made things a LOT more interesting (even if there may be some issues with the actual mechanics of it. Though there was a story recently about a chip that can rewrite itself... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15351071).
Consty
> But that's my analysis, which I applied 20 years ago. What other good
> options would you have liked to see, or do you think others would have
> preferred?
>
> Dave
>