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Honestly Stargate was a 'humanity, fuck yeah!' series that could easily have been darker and edgier and was probably trending that way anyways. The turn towards interpersonal melodrama was, however, baffling- I liked seeing American soldiers kicking ass in space, not some alien hangers on worrying about their personal problems.
It could easily have had a Space! Iraq storyline.
Some of Stargate SG-1's problems were also wanting to become Voyager of all things, rather than Battlestar Galactica. Some extent of that was probably inevitable as power inflation started giving the US military access to spaceships, superweapons, (those stupid zats), Jackson ascending so often it turned into a punch line, and so on, but a lot of the entire Ori plotline was trying so hard to be MagicBullshitBorg following in the tracks of Seven of Nine, without understanding why that worked (and so many other interpersonal melodrama bits of Voyager didn't work!).
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There were definitely dark veins and they could have tried to balance things (or just kept "classic" SG and then added things like Universe).
But I think they were just embarrassed, it's a status thing. Stargate was essentially the sort of show people mean when they say "I don't like fantasy besides Game of Thrones". BSG and the praise it got gave them an alternative/pretext.
A shame it wasn't actually as popular or well-regarded as Game of Thrones.
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