LOST - Season 4 - Ep 11

This last episode of LOST pretty much embodies everything I currently loathe about the show.
1. I hate it when they create more flashbacks/forwards (as it doesn't matter when there's no plot progression) that don't build up character, but instead create melodramatic sequences about people we no longer care about. Even when the flashbacks/forwards create a nice little self-contained story they're still hard to like as they're chopping away time from the main plot.
2. What's the point of letting Jack have a life crisis when we know he gets off the island and is safe?
3. The main thing that I'm interested in is the mystery - Dharma - The Others - The Hatch - Scientific Experiments. When we have these "filler" episodes that supposedly do something other than progress the plot, all it does is make me wait for the next "real" episode where something actually happens. The only thing that happened in this episode is that Claire ran off chasing a hallucinatory vision of a lost family member. And seriously, that gimmick is getting annoying. It might've been cool the first couple times, but they've been using it over, and over, and over for 4 seasons now in the exact same manner with no explanation. And if making Claire run off into the jungle is supposed to be plot progression, then I am sad.

I probably liked LOST best back in season 2. It was the tale of the survivors, and Locke and Jack, in a mysterious hatch on a stranded island, where unknown forces would kidnap the children and certain people on lists, while also loving to play mind games with you; 4-8-15-16-23-42 would repeat on an endless signal that a Navy outpost man heard and went to a madhouse for, and that also happens to be the code for a button which the characters don't know if they should or should not push; and then crazy zany maps of dharma hatches appear on the wall when you put the hatch in lock down mode.
It was mysteriously suspenseful and every element of that mystery was just so intriguing and I loved it.

Now we have the story of characters splitting into so many sub-groups we can't count (The Good Others, the Bad Others, the Jack LOSTies, the Locke LOSTies, the Good Boat People, the Bad Boat People, the Whidmore People), all fighting for something, but we know the ultimate outcome thanks to these flashforwards.
Something feels missing.