So, I'm going to guess that they'll be at Earth by the mid-season cliffhanger.
Blegh... That'd stink.
They set up the entire series to have the arrival at Earth be the goal of everyone's plight. IMHO they should either start wrapping up everyone's more minor problems before they get to Earth and then have Earth complete the series by helping the colonials (whether that be provide asylum from the hostile cylons or armed protection; it's the colonials original problem), or tie in all of the solution to the arrival at Earth. Either way, they should hold off the arrival at Earth to the last possible second, barring epilogues of course.
If the had the fleet arrive at Earth mid-season, they'd be climaxing the series way too early. Everything else past that IMHO would be falling action and just be lame compared to that, unless they downplayed the arrival. If they did that, then the series isn't worth watching anymore because that's one of the main premises to the show, and solving that early only creates the "wat we do now?" issue.
If they didn't downplay the arrival, they'd need to make the entire second half of the season into a huge finale, which would probably wouldn't be quite as bad as downplaying the arrival.
----
On an unrelated note,
Complexity in a show is good, but with such a large delay between the broadcast of each episode, the more the episodes need to become independent of each other. Otherwise they become one huge 40 hour movie, or an unabridged screenplay of a 1500 page book. And that's not easy to watch at biweekly intervals. IMHO they should try and go back to the two or three episode sub-series dealing with relatively small facets of the show, and have various less blatant issues string everything together, along with the main goal of reaching Earth being the primary "trunk" of the series.
It seems in the latter series they're sort of getting that, but the plots for each individual episode don't really go anywhere. These subplots are way to vague, and they're not providing enough substance from the main plot (well at least in episode 8) for that to be the main focus.
This given, the show is still bounds better than any other television show I can think of. The entire thing has an encompassing plot, yet the episodes still retain a certain essence of independantness (although that could be a bit stronger).
Also, I was disappointed that they didn't say anything about Geta. I'm assuming he's still in the sickbay with his single leg, or did he die?