^ I'm gonna have to agree. "All about the characters" is a disingenuous mantra. It doesn't take much to see that plot largely took precedent over characters in the later seasons. Which wouldn't exactly be so much of a problem if the plot itself weren't so inherently dumb and hollow.
For me this was a character story... sorry you wasted your time with it lol
But that's the thing, Widmore was a character too; an extremely influential one. He affected many of our main characters' lives throughout the seasons, so it would've been cool if they had payed off his overwhelming significance in the story's greater context.
The former leader of the Others
The man who helped fund The Dharma Initiative
The man who sent a freighter full of mercenaries that slaughtered half the castaways
Benjamin Linus' main rival
Farraday's father
The bane of Desmond's existence
I dunno, that stuff seems preeeetty important to me. Then all of Widmore's formerly intriguing ambitions - that the writers had built up year after year - get thrown under the bus when Jacob conveniently "shows him the error of his ways" (off screen), before he's subsequently killed off. And I'm led to believe Charles' ultimate purpose was just to bring Desmond back to the Island so he could complete a simple task? Well ok then, why should I have cared about his involvement in the first place?
It's pretty safe to say the writers dropped the ball on closing out his arc in a satisfying way. The same could be said for too many other characters and stories I used to genuinely like on the show.