I agree completely. These characters aren’t introduced as heroes; they become heroes.
Compare: On Trek, Picard was a star athlete at the Academy, he has his pick of plum assignments, he’s the captain of the flagship, he’s even an expert on theta-band radiation. 
Everybody is already outstanding from minute one, so there’s less room for them to rise to the occasion. This fits in with the utopian vision of Trek, where people’s goodness has come to the fore and petty differences are a thing of the past; instead of identifying with the characters, we find them admirable and we aspire to their level of greatness.
But on Galactica, these are ordinary people with ordinary lives who are thrust into an extraordinary situation. We don’t admire the characters simply for who they are; we identify with them on the basis of their recognizable problems, and then we admire them for what they find themselves capable of doing. Instead of yearning toward the gods on their pedestals, we walk in the shoes of ordinary people to see what we ourselves can accomplish when pressed. It’s a huge difference in storytelling mindset, and for my money it’s much richer and much more fulfilling.
Re the spoiler policy:
I am not a fan of legal prescriptivism. I am not a fan of trying to write rules based on imagined contingencies. I am, instead, a fan of treating people like adults and letting common sense hold sway. I believe that given a general but common-sense guideline, most people are capable of policing themselves; but, by contrast, given a set of carefully-worded restrictions, people automatically shift into loophole-seeking mode. It’s not bad; it’s just a reality of human nature. It’s the same impulse that causes the wags in the back row of a Sunday School class to pepper the teacher with hypotheticals and exceptions and speculative nitpicking based on an overly literal reading of the rules presented to that point. In other words, something like this:
strikes me as being pretty much the same thing as the rabbi making a presentation on dietary restrictions, and the wiseacre kid piping up with, “You didn’t say we couldn’t drink antifreeze. Can we drink antifreeze?” (On a personal note, this is incidentally a big reason I got out of Human Resources in my career path; the endless and pointless needling of corporate policy by people with nothing better to do than tweak the nose of authority drove me absolutely nuts.)
It seems self-evident to me that, according to common sense, spoiler boxes are used whenever one is uncertain whether other people would appreciate reading and knowing some piece of material, and whenever one judges that circumspection would be appreciated in discussion of same. Definite facts about upcoming episodes? Certainly. One’s own speculation about the direction of the story? Probably not. Relating someone else’s speculation, seen elsewhere and reproduced here? That’s a little harder, because one doesn’t know whether that secondhand speculation is based on anything or not. There’s a hard center where we all agree spoiler boxes are appropriate (known future facts), and then a spreading gray area where different people can have different opinions.
That’s why I phrased the spoiler policy the way I did: to get away from those varying viewpoints and avoid the legalistic rulemaking that inevitably gets nitpicked to death (again, as informed by my history in HR, and a desire not to engage in that kind of wonkish anticipatory policymaking). Seems now, though, that nitpicking will be unavoidable no matter how the policy is stated.
So, recognizing that my history may have made me more sensitive about this than is healthy, I’m going to back up a step, and offer a compromise. Try this on for size:
Spoiler policy: If it’s been aired, it doesn’t have to be hidden in a spoiler box. If it hasn’t been aired and you’re worried people might not want to see it or know about it, hide it in a spoiler box, but make sure to label what’s being hidden so we can decide for ourselves whether or not to read it.
Comments?