Desperate Housewives: (Flash) forward progress?

I don't blog on "Desperate Housewives" that often (haven't since this season's premiere, I believe), but as I did devote a good chunk of time to watching the finale, might as well offer up some thoughts, just as soon as I remember to always bet on Nathan Fillion in a fair fight...

So I watched the finale for two reasons: 1)To get a wrap-up to the Dana Delany storyline, which was one of the few things that had interested me whenever I checked out the show this year; and 2)To see how the writers would deal with the much-rumored time jump.

The first ended well enough, I suppose (with some pugilistic assistance from my man Fillion, and from Gary Cole playing one of those bad guys too stupid to keep his mouth shut when he's being held at gunpoint) but wasn't enough to compensate for how much I've grown to dislike the other parts of the show. Susan again winds up in a story (the baby-naming thing) where, rather than have an actual conversation with someone, she resorts to goofy, Ain't-I-Cute subterfuge. Gaby's as spoiled as ever (I recognize that's in the character's design; I just don't find her amusing enough to tolerate it). And even though I knew Lynette and her husband would find a way to stop his manipulative adultery-spawn, it's not something I wanted to sit through waiting for the denouement. (Again, I recognize that it's a soap and I'm not a standard soap fan; anytime one of these evil pathological liars shows up -- see also Michelle Trachtenberg on "Gossip Girl" -- I start to zone out.)

But Delany was very good, and Bree remains the strongest original character, the only one where the writers (thanks to Marcia Cross) usually get to have their cake and eat it, too, with making her likable and human in spite of her more extreme behavior.

As for the time jump, this is now the third series to do it in recent years, starting with the New Caprica arc on "Battlestar Galctica" and the institution of the flash-forwards this year on "Lost." Admittedly, much of the "Lost" action still takes place in what we consider the present-day, but at what point does advancing your characters past all the dead spaces in their lives (say, Gaby dealing with pregnancy and caring for infants) cease to be an interesting storytelling device and start seeming like the crutch of a TV show with too many narrative dead ends that need to be quickly abandoned?

If you're still watching the show, how happy were you with this Delany-augmented season? And does the time jump make you more or less likely to want to stick around come fall?