Did you read issue 11 and 12 and then thought the Batsu thing was out of the blue or did you, as you said, just flip through the pages and saw nakedness?
Of course, it took me a few reading to see that "Huh, I guess Buffy sleeping with Satsu made sense", and some people still don't get it, but if you didn't read it,
just flipped, no wonder you don't get it.
Don't get me wrong, I thought Buffy wasn't attracted to women at all until issue 12. But I think it was more a comfort/they-shared-a-moment-thing than "true" attraction to a woman and the womanly parts.
But this isn't a Batsu thread, so I'll leave it there.
There is a lot of things in Season 8 that needs to be explained tough. The Mecha-Dawn thing was way out there, and even tough I can fanwank it to make sense, Season 8 is in no way comparable to the other seasons when it comes to being easy to understand/explain. A lot of questions left unanswered, which I think is part of it's charm.
For example, the telepathy thing threw me in The Gift, but I figured that Willow was getting stronger and mind-control/mind-powers wasn't that big a leap. Mecha Dawn was ... a big leap. I guess Willow built her(maybe she learned a lot from the Buffy-bot) or bought her, made her superhuge and teleported her.
Actually, I'm not sure if Mecha-Dawn is such a huge surprise when you think about it. Maybe it's just feels like it's been done before, so now it seems like a paraody? It's not like Angel losing his soul due to happines, alternative dimensions, higher beings, Jasmine etceetc wasn't a big leap forward, mythology and plotwise. Maybe we think Mecha Dawn and the treefolks and Gepeto etcetc where too much simply because we immediatly thought "Haven't I read this comic/book, seen this movie before?"
If we hadn't seen/read Lord of the rings and watched Godzilla or any movie with robots, would we still think "Come on, this is just too much"?
Just a thought.