Aaargh!!! Oh, the anguish of being a fan of slow-moving sporadically entertaining cerebral sci-fi!!
I do believe the show had hope, but it certainly suffered from the same problems that affect almost all long-story-arc television these days: 1) the producers don't know how many years they are going to have to tell the story going into the project. (In LOST, for example, this resulted in a good 2-3 seasons of 'filler material' during which the show became so convoluted that basically everybody stopped caring enough to try to understand it. 2) the shows don't provide any resolution of major plot points on a season-by-season level. 24, of course, is the best example of a program doing this well. Every season there is resolution of the main plot. Mad Men also, has a separate central theme for each season which is fully explored and then discarded by the next season. Caprica didn't have that. It just sort of slowly ground on, and given the producers had no idea how long it was supposed to go on for, it's difficult to bring major plot points to satisfying conclusions in a timely enough schedule to keep audiences satisfied.
But I, for one, was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt... Oh well, now I guess I'll have to turn all my attention to the new Sherlock Holmes on PBS. Go Sherlock! (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/sherlock/watch.html)