My complaints:
*Eli's character was what after the first two episodes? I know, boring interruptions. Good actor, just the writers screwed him over.
Eli was the good to Rush's evil scientist part. It's just so happens that, by total accident, Rodney McKay was a fully formed character. Truly 3 dimensional! So the writers took that character, split him into good and evil versions and created Rush and Eli. It's quote obvious once you know to look for it. Eli is the playful, joking genius. Rush is the angry, arrogant genius.
*Once Destiny left the galaxy, the stones should have failed to work. Point of no return and cut off. Could have been interesting seeing people trapped in another's body.
The stones were a stupid concept in SG-1 season 9, and they were stupid concept in SGU. Personally I would have had the crew of Destiny completely cut off from Earth; no communication and no hopes of ever getting home. That way they could actually get on with telling stories about human exploration and survival, instead of keeping some ridiculous hope of returning the crew home. But that's just me.
*Very little contact with life on other passing planets.
OK, you mean intelligent life, right? Because they ran into several planets with breathable atmospheres (a sure sign of life) and plenty of plants on their journey.
As for aliens, I was pissed that when they finally did run into aliens, they turned out to be CGI humanoids. In fact, the show runner Brad Wright said prior to SGU's premiere that the aliens in the show would be like nothing we've ever seen before... Lets see: 1 head? Check. 2 arms and legs? Check. Head has 1 mounth, 2 eyes and some nostrils? Check, check and check. LAME.
*There needed to be more space on space action and not planet surface shoot and scoot battles through the gate.
How is it that this ship, which clearly predates the construction of Atlantis, can possibly still be operational after millions of years? It's fantasy, not science fiction. Atlantis was a joke in itself, because it was only about 5-6 million years old. Destiny is approximately 20 million years old! My suspension of disbelief almost disintegrated when I started watching this series.
*To many filler episodes that progressed actor development. That stole from the over all story line and slowed things down. I could careless who is a lesbian, divorced, or wanting to see their mommy.
Right! You just want to see ship-to-ship combat against aliens we know nothing about. See, this is why science fiction series can't survive.
For me the writers deserve 100% of the blame of the failure, not the actors, set crew, or other support staff.
Well, the writers deserve some of the blame, but mostly it falls on the shoulders of Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper, the show runners. These are the same guys that continued to take these series out of the Milky Way and put them farther and farther away from what made them cool! I mean, the whole concept of StarGate is that it's happening, now, in the real world. By moving the series farther and farther away from Earth, it diminished any worries that Earth was in any sort of danger, which is what viewers on Earth care about! I don't give a shit about a couple hundred people stuck a few million light years away. And I care less about a couple dozen people stuck a few billion light years away even less.
HINT: The further removed Earth became from the series, the less I cared about the series. Make sense?