1) figured out who the Cylons were at the very beginning, and planted subtle clues all along the way. There's still no need to introduce the concept of the Final Five until Season 3, but the way they did it leaves several loose ends that needed to be tied up (or ignored: Baltar tests one of the Final Five at one point, but later appears not to know who any of them are). That said, by the end of Season Two, we'd established a clever mis-lead, in that each of the Significant Seven had been revealed as a Cylon in either the first (Two, Three, Four, Six) or second (One, Five, Eight) episodes they appeared in, whereas each of the Final Five had been around for years. It was a nice mis-lead, and it made the reveal of the Final Five a massive surprise. It just would have been better if a) they didn't have to tie up so many loose ends, like suddenly making Hot Dog a father, and b) they didn't have to invent two never-before-seen Cylon infiltrators in The Plan to make Boomer's "there are eight [Cylons in the fleet]" statement work. (Although, admittedly, if Boomer had told the truth and said that there were only six, the Caprica Resistance would contain the obvious suspects, and if Boomer had said that there were only two - the Three and the One had to have been the only ones her sleeper persona knew about - then people would have been confused about the Final Five a full year too early.)
2) done a better job with "Epiphanies." From the on-screen dialogue in that episode, there's no reason to assume that when Roslin's cancer returned in Season 4, they couldn't have just harvested Hera's blood again. Hell, that would have made for an interesting story idea, probably the biggest missed opportunity in the entire show: can you justify harvesting a baby's blood every time someone gets the flu? Instead, in contradiction to what's on the screen, we accept Ron Moore's podcast comment about it actually being stem cells that cured Roslin's cancer as the accepted canon. Which leads me directly to:
3) not rely too heavily on people watching the commentaries. Some viewers (such as my parents) are still convinced that nobody was aboard the Olympic Carrier when Lee shot it down, despite the fact that several characters have said it was occupied, and Ron Moore has said so as well in the commentary. I could go a bit further here, and say "not editing the re-caps to include things that weren't actually in previous episodes," but I understand the need to do this. Battlestar was a character-driven show. A lot of time had to be spent on the characters, sometimes at the expense of minor plot points that could be easily slipped into a recap. It's annoying, but understandable.
4) the Luddite thing in the finale. See, at the end of "Resurrection Ship, Part 2," Gina escaped from Pegasus and was living comfortably aboard Cloud Nine by the next episode. We didn't need to know the details. Likewise, they didn't need everyone to go all Luddite on us for the sake of wrapping up loose ends. If they felt like promoting a Luddite agenda, then the final montage of robots gets that particular message across just fine. All they really needed to do was drop some random dialogue either from our heroes, about how all their equipment will decay and become unuseable in time, or from Head-Six and Head-Baltar about how the Ice Age nearly wiped them all out.
I get that one of Lee's character flaws is that he's so desperate to do the right thing that he doesn't always think things through (and I like that flaw; it's one of the things that makes him so interesting as a character, and makes his courtroom scene with Roslin in "Crossroads, Part 1" one of my favorite scenes in the show), but the rest of the fleet can't possibly be that naive as well. Stone-age level technology means every single Colonial is probably going to die of disease within about ten years. The all-important Hera will be lucky to see 20.
At some point in Season 4, the refinery ship should have been destroyed, further limiting the fleet's options; "we now have 17 more jumps to find a safe planet before we run out of fuel." Make it obvious that their current technology will not last much longer, and that they have no way of replacing it. The series started off with Adama accepting the inevitable: he couldn't stay and fight the Cylons, he had to run. It should have ended in a similar fashion. If not, then Galactica's condition should have been a signal that they needed to find and colonize a planet ASAP, not strip the ship for parts and try to continue on without any real protection except from the rebel Baseship.
5) keep a better track of logistics. While I appreciated the survivor count at the beginning of each episode, which at least told me that the writers were taking things more seriously than the production team of Star Trek: Voyager, there's no way that Galactica could have fired off as much ammunition and lost as many Vipers as they did. I appreciate that they played it semi-realistically ("Flight of the Phoenix," mention of a Viper production facility on the Pegasus in "Scar," and one fuel crisis in each of the first three seasons - although the third was due to a strike, rather than a shortage), but food and water are each addressed only once, and Galactica's still can't possibly account for Saul Tigh's booze intake. As Zarek said in "Colonial Day," there is no production. As my mother asked during "Black Market," who's producing all the medicine?
6) the Opera House vision. So this vision has Athena and Roslin herd Hera towards Baltar and Six, who take her away. In reality, Athena and Roslin herd Hera towards Baltar and Six, who take her away. So far, so good. But they take her to CIC, where she's immediately used as a hostage by Cavil as the writers tease us one more time with a "negotiation" resolution. If these visions are messages from God telling them to keep Hera safe, isn't arranging for her to be Cavil's hostage pretty much the last thing you want to have happen? And what the hell was Tigh doing up on that balcony? He's never been up there during combat before. The only reason he went up there was so that every bit of the vision could fall neatly into place.
And now, here is a brief list of things that don't annoy me nearly as much as they annoy the average fan:
Lee and Dee. There were hints of that going all the way back to 2.4, "Resistance," and that was well before they started shacking up (2.17, "The Captain's Hand"). It's true that Dee occasionally comes off as passive or weak ("Sacrifice," "Rapture"), but her motivations - to get what happiness she can today because she might be dead tomorrow - resonate clearly in this post-apocalyptic setting.
"God did it." When Head-Six starts claiming to be an angel of God, and then once Head-Baltar shows up and no other explanation suffices, and then when a major character returns from the dead, it becomes absolutely undeniable that there's a greater force at work here.
"Black Market," "Hero," and "The Woman King." See their respective reviews as they come up. Fans tend to hate these episodes because people act out of character, or something contradicts established continuity. And while it's hard to defend "Hero" from that latter charge, these episodes take our characters and show that they are three-dimensional, and that they're not always heroes.
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