The "real" ending won't come until Turn 25, though it looks like all the action should be wrapped up by 24, leaving some sort of epilogue afterwarRAB.
HellCat does have a point about it feeling a little too late for an Emperor Lelouch arc, but the thing is...I would say they're rushing things precisely because the main staff really wanted to get Lelouch to this point. If not only in terms of story per se, then in terms of character as well.
But the whole time slot change set them back too much, which made them scrarable to fit everything in -what they wanted to do *and* what they needed to make this a "new" show, for a different time slot and also for any marketing purposes Sunrise had in mind.
It's not like it's impossible to balance such factors (even G00 has marketing interests behind it, though fortunately there was no equivalent time slot shuffle and the story should pick right up), and maybe other creators would have managed just fine, but the staff obviously made mistakes in the process, out of a desire to do too much.
I can easily see a better show coming out of R2 if things had been scaled back a bit, but that would have required the director and his staff to compromise a lot more than what they seemingly did.
The result: both excessive executive meddling and excessive creative freedom made the show less than what it could have been, though I still don't think it's without any positive qualities.