By having her end up with a DT clone to settle down with just cheapened it all somehow, and made it seem that all she really cared about was romance with the hotter Doctor after all

I couldn't agree more -- that's the overriding feeling I get from the ending too, and it doesn't square with my view of Rose. And although I do believe that over the course of their adventures, she did come to love Ten almost as much as Nine, in the end, it wasn't about the hearts and flowers and wedding bells at all.

Isn't it? They both deserved so much better, IMO...although I'm not quite sure as to what that 'better' might have been. Perhaps Rose could have come back on board the TARDIS; perhaps Donna could have been allowed to die with her memories intact...I don't know; perhaps that's the trouble with convoluted storylines, when you come to tie up loose ends, there's no way you can do it neatly or please eveybody.

And Donna [sigh] I really liked Donna. I wish she could have lasted more than one season.

Likewise. She was such a refreshing change from the mooneyed Martha, and really just what The Doctor needed: a true friend. Which is why I can't believe that he did what he did to her, ride roughshod over her wishes, ignore them. Poor Donna, to be forever denied the knowledge of how awesome she was in one critical moment of the universe's history.

And Rose...condemned to live out her life in an AU with 10.5 for company...it may work out OK; she's plucky enough and she's sort of used to Time Lords changing on her, but still...it would have been nice for her to have been asked first.

I liked Donna from the very beginning, bought into the Doctor-Donna dynamic from The Runaway Bride and was overjoyed when she came back as this season's companion. I liked that she wasn't interested in him romantically, that they were friends. I liked her common sensical approach to the problems they encountered, and how she could stop and make him think before he would act. There's also her humanity, her foibles, her loud mouth to cover up that fact that she really didn't believe in herself as anything special -- and I think that that's the worst of the whole mind-wipe scenario: she's back at square one, back with low self-esteem, because she doesn't know, and can't ever remember, that for one shining moment she was the most important woman in the universe. When she was pleading with him not to take her memories, that all she wanted was to travel with him forever, it broke my heart. I know he meant well, but the arrogance of the man! Who was he to decide that it was better to take out the Time Lord mind and wipe out a lot of her human experiences in the process, and live; than let the process take it's natural course and let her die happy?

As to Rose Tyler, of course on the one hand, she did get a consolation prize in NotQuiteThe Doctor, but that's just it, he's not quite The Doctor, and Rose...I always thought her love for The Doctor was more than just a wish to settle down and have babies. And I still believe that her Doctor was Nine more than Ten, who she came to love and appreciate, but who she never fully connected with on such a basic, elemental level as with his predecessor.