Earth Final Conflict - Why all of the cast changes? Backstory?

I got back into the show with season 4, but it was still nowhere near as good as the first.

 

To me, season 4 felt like thy were REALLY trying to get back to where the 1st was at, and made me very hopeful for the 5th season...and no need to express my disappointment!

 

Season 4 was a very different show than Season 1, but in its own way it was just as entertaining. "Atonement" is easily the second best episode of the show, with "Sandoval's Run" being the best. Sandoval really did bring out the best in the show, apparently.

Season 3 had some pretty good episodes too. I always liked the episode that wrote out the character of Jonathan Doors, even though it was a loss to the series going forward. The show was only ever awful in the early parts of season 2 and, of course, season 5. But it wasn't ever what it could have been.

Andromeda fell way harder, way faster. Once Robert Hewitt Wolfe was out the door it was practically unwatchable, save for a few minor exceptions.

 

The exceptions were pretty major. The post-RHW episodes in seasons 2-3 that were written by Zack Stentz & Ashley Edward Miller were consistently almost as good as the first season and a half had been. In fact, season 3 was bizarrely schizophrenic, because Stentz & Miller were still essentially writing the original incarnation of the series while the rest of the staff were writing a new, dumber, more fanciful version of the show.