It may not have made the movie any better, but you would at least get a clear resolution from a final fight, no matter the outcome.
What I find to be the particularly glaring issue with the ending is that it felt severely misplaced to me, especially when you consider how absurd the rest of the movie is.
The entire movie is about
these guys surviving ridiculous circumstances - (circumstances which should have surely killed them 15 minutes into the film), all the while fighting off poorly rendered CG wolves, jumping off cliffs and surviving, making working tightropes out of shirts to cross chasms, and they cap it off with Liam Neeson taping shooters to his fists.
After all that they tack on a non-ending in an effort to induce a poignant cliffhanger, so they can try and get the audience to empathize with a character that's barely been developed.
When your movie has spent the previous 115 minutes fully embracing it's preposterous premise, it might as well commit to it through the end, rather than turn pretentious for the finale.
Like I said, it tried to take itself way more seriously than it should.