Nope, I loved 9 & 10. I thought the Ori were an excellent bad guy. The Goa'uld were basically weekly canon fodder for SG1. They kicked Goa'uld ass week after week after week to the point where it seemed like there was no real danger. In seasons 9 & 10, a real bad guy showed up. I'm not going to go through and do it again, but a while back I did sort of an impromptu tally of SG1's conflicts with the Ori, and they won a very small minority of there encounters. There were a few times where they escaped or just got flat-out lucky, but they weren't really winning anything against the Ori. That alone made it a lot better.
On the one hand, you're right. The Ori kicked some serious ass and provided a genuine threat to SG-1 that I don't think the Goa'uld had really been since Season 3. On the other hand, the Ori were so powerful that the only way to stop them was with a series of deus ex machina pieces of Ancient tech.
That tendency towards the sudden introduction of rediculously powerful superweapons was one of the reasons why I stopped taking the show seriously. It was cool when they did it in "Lost City." But then we had the weapon at Dakara in Season 8, Merlin's weapon in Season 10, and the Ark of Truth in "The Ark of Truth."
My favorite seasons were Seasons 3-5. It was still finding its footing in Seasons 1 & 2. Season 3 was a marked improvement and things kept getting better & better each season up through Season 5.
I voted for Season 5 as my favorite because things seemed to be really coming to a head with the Tollan getting wiped out and a bunch of the Tok'ra getting killed and the rise of Anubis. Plus, Season 5 has some of my favorite episodes, like "Enemies," "Threshold," "Proving Ground," & "Meridian."
Season 6 was nice. I liked Jonas Quinn, although at times it seemed like it was just Daniel Jackson played by a less hammy actor. Daniel Jackson's guest appearances were always special. I think the season mostly just suffered from budget cuts. I was really starting to notice the filler episodes and episodes that were being very carefully written to include as little Col. O'Neill as possible while still keeping him on the show.
Season 7 was when I really started to lose faith in the show. The Anubis arc felt like it was going nowhere. Only the 1st 2 and last 2 episodes really seemed interested in finding Atlantis, even though Daniel had said that finding Atlantis was the most important thing ever in "Full Circle." Daniel Jackson's return seemed to have no real bearing on the storyline. They just brought him back because the fans wanted him back; then they dropped Jonas like a hot potato and acted like he never existed. This was also the worst season in terms of really stretching to just keep Col. O'Neill off the show. "Lost City" was great but I sometimes wish that they had gone with their original plan to make it a theatrical movie instead.
Season 8 feels like a lot of filler. There are some good episodes here & there but not a whole lot that's worth spending a lot of time on. The good thing is that Jack O'Neill actually feels like a more substantial presence here than he was in Season 7. I think that's a combination of consolidating his shooting schedule to put more of his scenes at the SGC and cutting the number of episodes down from 22 to 20 (and it feels like even less than that).
Seasons 9 & 10 are hard to judge against the others because they feel so much like a different show altogether. Carter, Teal'c, & Daniel are as good as ever. It's something of a relief to have Col. Mitchell around full time rather than constantly having to write Jack O'Neill out of every episode. (Although Mitchell still can't hold a candle to John Sheppard. In fact, I'm just a bigger fan of
Atlantis in general. No wonder my favorite
SG-1 episode from the last few seasons was "The Pegasus Project.") I liked bad girl Vala in Season 9. I liked her less in Season 10 when she became more like Daniel's puppy dog but she was still a necessary shot of new blood.
