I agree, it’s one thing to start over and it’s quite another to be stupid and wasteful. I thought it was a dumb message personally. Overall the ending was pretty good but I found some of it a bit over the top in the human progress is bad dept.
It wasn’t that human progress was bad, it’s that they had gotten themselves into a cycle. Remember “all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again”. They gave up all their technology to try to break that cycle, because if they kept the cycle they know how it ends (with the world destroyed, again). And then the tagger in the modern day was just asking the question, did they break the cycle? We’re making robots “again”, making robots that look like people (well sort of) “again”, will they be Cylons, will there be another Cylon rebellion, will it ALL happen again? Or did we learn some essential truth having to build up to this the long way that will break the cycle? It’s not that progress is bad, it’s that progress has risks, we develop tools that are good for living AND killing. And now that we’re developing tools that will probably have some level of self awareness that has potential problems, it’ll be a very bad thing if the robots of the future go all Spartacus on us.