under the trappings of SCIENCE and science's attempts to understand faith.
At least, that's what they became after the writers for both series decided to head in those directions as both teams never had clear plans of what the show was going to tell the audience. And don't drag out that old "they knew what the final image of LOST was going to be" because even though they knew it would be SPOILERS Jack closing his eyes where he woke up in the pilot END SPOILERS. they had no idea how they were going to get there since the beginning, and that's a complete cop-out.
Caprica is also apparently a show of faith under the trappings of science, but much more overtly so, and as the OP writes, it is quite ponderous and I stopped watching it 2 episodes ago after it bored me to tears. Very likely the prequel concept was announced and then thrown to a bunch of writers without an actual plot and they had to scramble to write something that ended up being much too direction-less.