I'd argue that CBS should've worked with Axanar to come up with a solution, maybe an official license. Instead of suing the pants off Axanar, and ending up "losing" (yes, it's a loss when CBS was forced to come to a settlement out-of-court). New Voyages ended their run prematurely, and they were awarded with an official license to run a Trek Museum. So it seems pretty arbitrary what you can or can not do with the Trek IP before CBS steps in... New Voyages, Continues, Axanar... they all ran crowdfunding programs and made a ton of money, but only Axanar got sued. Continues decided to end their run prematurely, possibly because of Axanar, but also Vic's got an official voice role in Star Trek Online, so I guess you get rewarded for cooperating with CBS... and sued if you don't.
As for Continues finale, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Both this and the previous episode (Part 1), which tied together the show with both the start of TOS proper, and TMP. It was a really nice send-off in the end.