What other endings could Ray Bradbury have used in Fahrenheit 451?

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the nation has changed. Books are now outlawed. If robot-sniffing dogs smell out books in homes, firefighters break in and burn the homeowner's possessions. Montag is one of the firefighters responsible for the book burnings.
His view begins to change when he meets his young neighbor. Her ideas are hard to ignore. When he watches an elderly homeowner burn herself rather than face the loss of her books/freedoms, he starts to question his job. He steals one of her books and brings it home. The problem is that new short attention spans lead to abbreviated books and this full-length book is too hard for him.
Montag seeks the help of an elderly man who was an English professor. The problem is his own wife reports him for having books, and he's ordered by his chief to burn them. He can't do it and sets his chief on fire instead. He's now on the run and meets up with a group of drifters, who also love books and memorize them on the chance future generations embrace books. The group watches as their city is leveled with nuclear weapons.
Fahrenheit 451's ending finds the groups having a meal and planning to return to the city to start anew.
There are many other ways Ray Bradbury could have ended Fahrenheit 451. The group could have given up on the city and started a journey to a new land/area where they would start anew. Montag could have not killed his chief and died in the nuclear bombing. He could have never taken the book from the elderly woman's home in the first place and kept burning books. The question is what would the reader have learned if the book had not ended with plans to form a new world.