I've got to disagree, tabbi. Experiment in Terra (indeed, the entire Terra arc), together with episodes like Take the Celestra and Murder on the Rising Star, do represent the low point in storytelling for the series. But it does not mean the ideas weren't there.
If you are familiar with how BSG came to be, back in 1978, you'd know that a weekly series is NOT what Larson & Co. set out to do. BSG was to be a series of 2-hour TV movies, spread out over the season - not an hour every week. It was ABC who rushed it into production as a weekly series, and they had no one-hour story lines or scripts made up. The writers had to scramble - so you literally had the actors being handed their lines moments before they went before the cameras - inconsistencies between episodes - and episodes delivered to the network mere hours before they were to air.
With pressure like that, you'll get aluminum cowboy hats and Russian spies.
But you'll also get work like Hand of God, Living Legend, War of the Gods....
The possibilities of that universe - the one that Larson and his team created - are virtually endless. New enemies, new places, new phenomenon, all the things that make science fiction so great, and tales of the human condition so compelling were - and are - available to be told. There were obvious aspects that were never touched upon in the episodes that were created that following seasons would have delved into. The characters would have been deepened, built upon.
Running out of ideas? They'd barely scratched the surface.
I am
Dawg