'Lost' Finale

This post assumes that you have seen the actual last show and is therefore stuffed with SPOILERS. Please read accordingly.

I said last night that I was satisfied with the finale and I'll stand by that. But that opinion is slipping the more I think about it the less satisfied I'm becoming. The last show put a cap on the story and it felt like a true ending and a farewell to some people that I've been watching for longer than I've been married.
The best take I've seen is probably here from Megan McArdle:

To some extent, the producers of Lost needed to choose between paying off the human drama, and paying off the sci-fi/fantasy/ghost story part; I think there's maybe a reason that those sorts of stories suffer on the character side. When what we might call the "technical" stuff is driving the plot, the characters necessarily become less rich, because complex characters who develop in unpredictable ways get in the way of making all those little jigsaw pieces fit together. Science fiction geeks are naturally mad, but I'm not sure that the producers made the wrong choice--especially when you think of what it took to get this series made, very expensively, on network television.

She argues that doubts on the long term status of the show put the writers in a bad spot early on and by the time an endpoint was decided the story was too muddled to solve everything. Which is certainly a theory with merit.
Some thoughts:

• They could have worked harder at it. The early part of the last season had a lot to do with a mysterious temple and a new candidate. None of it particularly advanced the plot and it could have been dropped without any harm.
  
• In it's place we could have gotten some back-story on Dharma and the battle between Ben and Widmore. You know, the stuff that made season five so interesting? Instead that whole plot line was resolved in about two paragraphs of narrative without any but the surface questions being answered.
• Along with the temple, how did Sayid revive? No answer at all. In fact we can speculate about Sayid's whole sequence during the last season but that's all we can do.
• Speaking of which, does anyone think that Sayid's soulmate was Shannon? Anyone? Seriously writers, were you watching the same show as everyone else?
• The best part of the last season was the sideways world. It was fascinating to see people in different locations and circumstances than originally. And then we find out that it was some kind of shared brain flicker or purgatory or something. That means that half of the stories advanced during the last season had no real consequences. No wonder Desmond was running people over.
• Back on 'island time' the story proceeded in almost the most predictable way possible. Two minor surprises (Lapidus alive and fake Locke's sudden mortality) but the rest was very straightforward. This isn't a big deal but I'm surprised that they didn't come up with something better for the end.
• It wasn't all bad. The reunions were touching, especially the one between Sawyer and Juliette. And it was nice to see a happy Locke . . .
  

I was satisfied but there was tremendous wasted potential here.