I don't understand how so many people who are supposedly political observers seem to cling to this idea that he won't eventually endorse the Democratic nominee...
Well, Eugene McCarthy, Ted Kennedy, and Jerry Brown didn't endorse the democratic nominee. It's not unheard of for a democratic primary to end in bitterness with the loser making unreasonable demands and refusing to endorse the winner.
The thing is, people remember McCarthy and Brown as tremendous assholes for what they did. Nobody today remembers Jerry Brown's 1992 campaign fondly, he's remembered as bitter, petulant, and caught up in a one-sided feud with Clinton that Clinton couldn't care less about. Eugene McCarthy's 1968 temper tantrum is the case study everyone points to for how someone could completely screw up a convention and presidential race, and he had far more of a case than Bernie given that the race was in complete flux after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. The only reason Ted Kennedy isn't viewed as negatively is because most people are aware that Carter was a dick to Kennedy throughout his presidency.
What is Bernie's justification for going to the convention? Clinton has been extraordinarily kind and gentle with him throughout the primary process, not running a single attack ad against him. His claims of the party stealing the nomination from him and being unfair to him or not respecting his supporters are just a bunch of insubstantial fluff and he knows it. McCarthy and Kennedy at least had motivations for refusing to endorse. What is Bernie's motivation? Is he just Jerry Brown '92 redux? That's the most irritating thing about his issuing of demands and his insistence on going through to the convention. He doesn't seem to have any actual good reason to do it other than that he wants attention (a.k.a. "the movement must survive", "the revolution must continue", whatever) or, as the Politico article inside his campaign revealed, that he's just bitter and angry at Hillary Clinton and the DNC in a one-sided way.
Ted Kennedy stated at the 1980 convention that he would support Carter, and he did campaign with and for Carter in the 1980 election.
Eugene McCarthy did not endorse HHH until late in the 1968 campaign, after HHH's Salt Lake City speech on October 1, 1968, where he broke (somewhat) with LBJ's Vietnam policies.
Jerry Brown never said he wouldn't vote for Clinton in 1992, and did endorse him. In 1992, Jerry Brown was 10 years out of office, after having been defeated for a Senate seat; it's not like his stature was at the level of McCarthy, Ted Kennedy, or Sanders.
BTW, George Wallace, who didn't endorse McGovern, got a speaking slot at the 1972 Democratic convention. Now the Democratic Party was much different then, and it had a lot of white Southern delegates who were either Wallace partisans or OK with Wallace, but Wallace made he speech (which advocated more defense and less welfare; he actually used those words) and it was respectfully received. The 1972 Democratic National Convention was not the disaster the 1968 convention was; its problem was that counterculture liberalism and
avant garde politics were on display in a way that Middle America was not going to accept. The Democrats, in their way, did not overcome the cosmetics of the 1972 convention for 20 years.
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