The whole theme of the first seven or so seasons was teching up and gathering allies to say "you're not my real dad/god" to the evil sufficiently advanced aliens.
But then having reached the end of that arc and wanting to keep the show going, they introduced some even more godly evil aliens who weren't just sufficiently advanced but were actual magic. I felt it deflated the point made in the whole first arc, that there ain't nobody better then you, to then trot out some evil canonically supernatural entities.
I definitely disagree on that. SG1 (and Atlantis for that matter) were top quality till the end imo.
The point with the Ori was imo that you shouldn't follow evil gods EVEN if they have magical powers and a nice message. It made the arguments far more tricky, because they couldn't just reveal their false godhood and automatically win. To me it felt like a very natural progression of the underlying theme, kinda like the next level of difficulty.
Assuming you're talking about the pryors or however you spell it, wasn't the whole point they were trying to make that "any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic"? It's been a hot minute since I watched it but my recollection is that they were pretty clear on that.
The Ori became the main villains. They were the evil version of ascended ancients. The Priors were their human minions who had been given a fraction of their powers.
That whole period of the show was blatantly an attempt to reset the story in an attempt to bring in more viewers. The SGC was almost completely restaffed with different characters. There was an attempt to even make a whole new SG-1 cast but it seemed pretty half hearted and kept rotating in the classic characters of Carter, Teal'C, and Daniel in varying combinations to assist Ben Browder's and Claudia Black's characters (I honestly forgot their names).
The idea of "sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic" was not exactly novel to the Ori. The entire concept of Gou'uld was that they presented themselves as gods. Ori seemed like writers being told they had to come up with a new villain capable of making the humans look like underdogs again, and so the power level of the villain went up.
If I recall correctly, the show was originally supposed to end when Atlantis was discovered. I suppose somebody got cold feet about canceling the flagship show, which led to the awkward situation of renewing it rather than fully handing the story to the new show.
The first time I rewatched the show from when I'd seen it as a kid, I was convinced there was an episode where he came back. He just made that good of an impression. That guy had so many story hooks.
The drag race episode was so silly. For some reason both it and Star Trek Voyager randomly had one.
The drag rade episode gave Demolition Man vibes, it was so cheesy, but Samantha Carters enthusiasm for it, being a gearhead adventurer, was just perfect.
I also liked that one Goa'uld who helped the team pilot a tunnel boring machine to the core of some planet. She had a great arc for just one episode.