This came from Doc Jensen's (of Entertainment Weekly) twitter update:
"The plane wreckage over Lost credits: not part of the story, say reliable sources. Meant to evoke mood. No Ajira crash, no time loops."
That answers one big question for me. I honestly feel like, with the explanation from the EW article Sike posted, that I'm pretty comfortable with the ending. I wonder what it would be like to re-watch season 6 knowing that the alt-verse is a "a psycho-spiritual virtual reality, a vast active living intelligence system (to borrow a phrase from Philip K. Dick's VALIS) created by the collective yearning of the castaways, an ethereal transfer station located at an unspecified junction between life and afterlife"??
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