BSG finale

Warning: spoilers ahead.

As a big fan of the new Battle Star Galactica series, I was extremely disappointed in the last 30 minutes of the final episode. Unlike the rest of the series, the end seemed more like every other show on the SciFi channel: poorly planned story, cardboard characters and cheesy. Given that the show was much, much more than simply trashy science fiction, this was really disappointing.

Escape Hatch has a great discussion about the problems with the ending. I especially agree with the list of ways to fix the finale:

1. Keep the first part, up until they jump to our Earth, exactly as it was. The only minor change I'd make the that part is un-cut the visuals that showed that all of Cavill's cylons and the Colony were sucked into the singularity and obliterated.
2. Explain how Kara's corpse ended up on Earth 1 when Apollo saw her ship explode. To do so, have a brief scene on Earth 2 in which Kara's father comes to her when she's alone, she asks him about it, and he says (with accompanying pictures shown to us) that her ship's explosion, much like the Raider she chased into the wormhole, was an illusion. The wormhole teleported her to Earth 1 where she crashlanded, freeing her consciousness to be used to lead the fleet back to earth. The rest of her ending and disappearance were right on the money, so keep them like that. I'd just like an explanation for why her corpse had to be on Earth 1.
3. Fix the offensiveness of Earth 2. Either have there not be any natives, or have the natives be advanced enough for integration as equals to become possible.
4. Provide a plausible explanation for what happened to the ships, technology, and Centurions. Perhaps the centurions and smaller ships land on earth, but somehow don't survive intact enough to be discovered in modern times (end up in the ocean? Pieces scattered to much when they wore down? Buried in volcano or avalanche?). The ships that are too big could just be stripped a bit and autopiloted into the sun? The fleet arrives too severely damaged, and they have no choice but to abandon them? Perhaps the other ships are destroyed in a counter-attack by Cavill, but his last basestar is also destroyed in the process? So we lose some of the fleet, the basestar is destroyed (poor Hoshi!), and the few remaining fleet ships are all that join the Galactica at Earth 2, making abandonment much more beliveable? See how easy it was to make it not seem quite so obviously forced and contrived?
5. Cut almost all of Lee's lines between finding earth and his father's leaving scene.
   
6. Have Anders volunteer to die, so it doesn't seem like he's being thrown away because he's inconveniently disabled.
7. KEEP THE FRAKKING RING ADAMA. Make some other, less gross sentimental gesture!
   
8. Cut almost all of the dialog out of the final scene (the "regression to the mean" stuff was the only value to that scene), and make the modern-day robot montage less ham-handed or cut it.