I took it as growth of his character. He went from trying to take advantage of naive and/or promiscuous young women to trying to prevent them from being taken advantage of. Now, of course it's not his place to do it for them, but he's showing off his new "fatherly" behavior. I didn't love that part, but it was nice to see him not being a total sleeze anymore.

I didn't mind the finale overall, but I was sad the mom, only recently introduced, died off. I get they were using that as a springboard to get him back to Robin, but I was frankly done with the Ted-Robin pairing.