So let me get this straight...

The big bad is killing all potential slayers.

So let's get all the remaining potential slayers under Buffy's roof to protect them.

Willow does a spell that makes all potential slayers into slayers, and suddenly there's an asston of women out there getting superpowers... why weren't they worth killing or protecting?

Baaaaaad writing.

Neither side got all the potential slayers, just as many as each side could find. The slayers even do a spell later in the season and find a potential right under their noses.

For both sides, the potentials that had been identified and trained by the Watchers Council were the most important. After that, girls who are closest to Buffy's age, or her age when she became The Slayer were next. A potential seems to need to be of a certain age to become The Slayer; there's no 80-year-old potentials, even though it holds to reason that some girls who were potentials at one point go old without ever being selected.

With the final spell, I think a lot of the undiscovered girls were much younger than the age of the typical Slayer, and perhaps wouldn't be identified by the typical methods.

When I first saw the series finale, it didn't ever bother me that they showed undiscovered potentials. I think with the way the series presented the potentials the ending always made sense to me.

Remember; the First wasn't able to identify potentials itself; it was up to Caleb and the Bringers to use magick to identify them and, just like Willow or the coven in England, that was a one-at-a time process.

why Caleb didn't try and blow up Buffy's house (like he did with the Wacher's Council) when she wasn't there. The First was able to do a fair amount of physical damage in 'Conversation With Dead People', why did it only do that once? At the time, I thought it was a big deal that Buffy's presence was the only thing protecting the potentials, but the First didn't seem to care whether the girls were alone or not.

Exactly. That's one of the things that REALLY bugged me about the whole First storyline. This supposed "source of all evil" really didn't seem to be all that interested in actually carrying out its plans. If the Bringers had access to all those explosives (the ones used against Faith and the potentials in the sewer), why not just have the bringers attack Buffy's house when everybody's asleep?

Or after their defeat in Dirty Girls, Caleb knocks Buffy out at the high school, then doesn't actually do anything else. With one slayer down (and Caleb being more than a match for either of them), he could have easily just waltzed on over to Buffy's place and done some serious damage.

There were all those potentials hanging around, you'd think that the show's creators would have offed a few of them here and there to really show us how much of a threat the First was, instead we were just told over and over how much danger they were in, and aside from the fight in Dirty Girls, we never really saw any proof of it.

That what "The First" was doing was never really explained.

If you read between the lines, it sort of looks like the FE is trying to finish off the slayer line; after which the Turok-Han (super prehistoric vampires) will be able to return to Earth.

One major plot hole is Faith.

See, Buffy isn't the slayer anymore. If she dies, nobody gets called. Faith needs to die in order for a new slayer to be called. They should've killed Buffy and kept Faith locked safely away in prison while they ran around killed the rest of the potentials.

See, this is where I get confused. (Though I do love how the season starts off with Buffy not even bothering to care who left the amulet in the bathroom, or even why - foreshadowing how the she just decides to take out the Hellmouth without caring about the details behind the First's plans beforehand) The First claims that it will become corporeal when its armies outnumber the humans. Assuming it's not just lying, then a> why focus on potentials and not just kill off as many people as possible everywhere? b> how will outnumbering cause it to become corporeal? much like the rules regarding the Seal of Danzalthaar, I don't think it's necessary for the Scoobies to know them, but it would have been nice to fill the audience in and c> how are the Turok-Hans being created, anyway? And from what? At first, when they bled Spike, I thought it needed vampire blood to create vampires. But then just any old blood would do. And that was just to open the seal, not create what came out from it.

All I really needed was just one episode in the spirit of 'Get It Done', where the mythology of the Seal (hey, we've seen the Hellmouth opened twice before, and neither time did it look anything like what happens here.) was explained. I was REALLY hoping that 'Storyteller' was gonna fulfill that requirement, but all we got was that a predatory act was required to activate it and tears (????!!!????) would "close" it. And, by "close", I mean that it's still apparently open again later for more to emerge.

A vocal Buffy hater is about to embark on watching all 7 Seasons in a row.