If it eases your pain slightly, almost no one I know (including myself) thought anything other than "Hendrix?!" when it played out. I didn't even know it WAS a Dylan song until I bumped up against some of that online debate you mentioned and it was pointed out to me.

As for explanations, I dunno. Maybe they hit the correct distance from earth for whatever time period this is for them to intercept the radio signal and it just happened to be that song... or maybe the writers were just really stoned. Time will tell.

Personally, I was impressed they had the cajones to kill Starbuck and thoroughly disapointed that she magically reappeared.

Music is all about personal preference anyway. Sure, some bands/singers you can say are rubbish, but a lot of them are good, depending on what you like, or feel like listening to at that moment. Personally I think The Who was better that Rolling Stones. I think you are right that certain bands/singers get elevated to a god-like status... and that could well be due to the amount of drugs people consumed at the time. If they were high everytime they listened to Bob Dylan, they probably get some of that euphoria nowadays when listening to him... at least, that explains it to me.

As for the show... I'll admit it has certainly done weird things. Unfortunately I was never taken in by Starbuck's death... it just seemed too obvious to mysteriously bring her back. The music I hadn't identified. Sure, I recognized it... but it didn't register to me as I was kinda lost in the fantasy of the show.

I think it's coming back in November, so I guess we'll all wait and see what happens. I just wanna see the metal cylons as 28mm miniatures

Arabin

The Who was better than the Stones! But you have to take your hat off to the Stones, after all these years, Fred and Barney are still on TV and still funny. The Violent Femmes have to be my favorite nowadays.

I won't comment on the new BSG, suffice to say that I found it unwatchable. It looked to me like they were attacked by the same PC space virus that wioped out the whole Star Trek series.

You'll probably not be pleased to hear there's a third Starship Troopers on the way. They've got Caspar Van Diem back as Johnny Rico for this one, along with Jolene Blalock (T'Pol). The working title is Starship Troopers: Marauder, suggesting that they are trying to ignore the second film as well.

As to having 'All Along The Watchtower' in BSG, the writers have suggested that "things that happened on Galactica were tied into our reality here on Earth in some way, in the past or the future, or some other connection". This probably accounts for characters from another having human names, firing recognizable guns, driving Hummers etc.
It's also not the first time this has happened in the series. The music that Starbuck plays to Helo, supposedly written by her father, is a Philip Glass composition.

There is always the "It was all just a bad dream..." exit strategy

Perhaps too much overthinking goes into the analysis of some of these shows. Starship Troopers, for example, just says this is the earth, but it's in the future, and it's a bit different... then they do whatever they want. I have never had any problems with, and even wondered about the language, or the music, or anything that breaks you from the fantasy of the sci-fi show. The religion aspect has certainly come into play, but I don't connect it with my real world views on religion. It's just a story.

Arabin

Firefly was indeed mightily awesome. Most of it was pitch-perfect, even though maybe some of the Western parallels were a little too close (the train robbery and whore house episodes). Great overall, with a believable and internaly consistent universe - and I love using Mandarin to get some truly dirty curses onto US network TV.

Was Firefly about that wayward ship that lands on gritty planets, always being chased by bad guys. The heroes were kinda space pirates, and they had some blue alien woman running the ships computers?

The female computer was in Andromeda, but the blue faced women you mentioned... I believe you might be thinking of Farscape. That ran for quite a while, and was enjoyable at times. The key actors ended up working on Stargate.

Arabin