The End of Battlestar Galactica

I have spent many evenings in the last month catching up on Battlestar Galactica, which frankly I hadn't seen a single episode of before. It is....pretty good science fiction. Not perfect, but pretty good. OK, excellent. And it's all the better for having no real aliens in it, no genetic therapy, no nanotechnology and the like. The ships are clunky and dirty and not all that appealing. People fight and good people die. There are no phasors, but crude nuclear weapons, inebriation and sloppy love.

If there's anything more impressive than a bunch of Cylon Centurions charging fearlessly into battle (especially alongside the humans), I have yet to see it.

I just have a few major questions/problems:

• if the Cylons nuked Caprica to extinguish the human race, whey didn't they simply nuke New Caprica when they had 90% of the human race cornered there? Why "occupy" it instead?
  
• Kara Thrace in the last episode -- she just vanished. Very unsatisfactory. What was she, anyway?
• I can't believe that any of the inumerable times a human accused a skinjob Cylon of being just a "machine," the Cylon didn't simply answer back, "Oh yeah? And what exactly are you? A large collection of atoms and molecules, delicately arranged, no less and no more than me." They would then argue about the soul and all that, but I can't imagine the human would have much more to add.
• I could do without all the FTL jumps... but it's curious that when the 13th Tribe escaped Earth and wandered around, special relativity was invoked to explain how little time passed for them but a great deal of time did for everyone else.... Fine -- we all know about the time dilation aspects of special relativity. But then they have everyone jumping around faster-than-light and don't once touch on the temporal aspects of it all. Whatever faster-than-light travel might be, it's got to seriously screw around with time, no?
• The only thing I really, really hated was that Asian officier's Australian accent in Razor. A very discordant mix that I still have trouble getting out of my head.
  

Still, I'm looking forward to the upcoming movie and the upcoming series Caprica.