I definitely felt there were diminishing returns to the cycle of someone getting suspicious and having them scramble to contain the situation.
I agree that the last two seasons were not a good (though I had no problem finishing them) and I blame that 100% on the Paige storyline. However, I did think the ending nailed it …
One of the first great anti-hero shows They make you root for the bad guys, understand their thinking, maybe even open up some patriotic Americans into questioning the validity of their assumptions.
Sopranos, breaking bad, and mad men all came earlier. I don’t think it’s that similar to any of those shows, but it wasn’t breaking any anti-hero ground, IMO.
None of those had a female lead with just as much screen time as the male lead, I think.
Keri Russell was a good lead, yes.
Stan should have double-tapped Philip and Elizabeth, and then blown Paige’s kneecaps off.
I think they ran through plot elements too many times. But I did not wind up cheering for them. They killed too many people. It’s more that they became monstrous. Congrats, you didn’t kill every single person you could have killed. /s
They were always monstrous.
I wound up rooting for them, or at least hoping they wouldn’t get caught. More precisely, I wound up feeling for them, which is tough to do with a couple of fucking murderous Russian commie spies.
I never really rooted for them.
I summarize the show with the Ss: lots of shooting, lots of spying, and lots of sexing.
Ditto. Deluded murderers.
Yes, but sympathetic, complicated, likable deluded murderers.
Not for me. Dozens of murders just made that impossible.
Sexy.
They slept around a lot. A LOT. And this was in the mid-1980s. No talk about safe sex and the initial AIDS scare.
There was almost nothing sympathetic or likable about Elizabeth. She was a robot made of ice.
“Almost” nothing? 
This post nailed my experience too. Those last few seasons were a slog, although it was fun to watch them trying to hide Keri Russell’s real life pregnancy. A lot of baggy jackets and hiding behind furniture.
I’m not sure what ending would have been more satisfying, but that wasn’t it. The arrest of at least one of them would have been more compelling.
The scene where she risks taking some zharkoye home to Philip. That is a big moment for her. She breaks the sacrosanct rules just to try to make a real connection with Philip, and he torpedos her with, “Sorry, I had too much takeout kung pao chicken.” She is actually a human being in that moment.
What I was hoping to see for the main story arc for the final season was:
Mainly initiated by Phillip and his concerns for the children, he “comes out” to Stan hoping to make a deal. Forgiveness for past crimes in return for info about the Soviet mole network. Elizabeth is basically coerced into going along. By the end of the season they have new identities, etc. and are “The Americans” in another sense.
The actual ending was a major disappointment.