I was utterly despondent when the news broke (I had been expecting it but the dropping the show after airing such a strong episode and withholding the last five episodes seemed unusually cruel).
Here's my personal take on the saga (I've no insider information but it's just my conclusion based on the observable facts and I've seen it mentioned elsewhere too).
Caprica was commissioned before the full scale of the financial crisis hit.
It's a very expensive show, with a large ensemble cast of established actors, filmed on location and on sets and it became obvious around the time of broadcast that they couldn't afford a second series. The decision was probably made to switch to a small cast green screen based series almost straight away.
Rather than admit this and create a negative buzz in business circles they deliberately scuppered Caprica using the bizarre promotion and broadcast methods they used and announcing Blood And Chrome around the time of broadcast of the second half of the series.
This meant the few people who realised the show had come back would stop watching as it was pretty clear that it was going to be canceled and hardly anyone watches a story based show where the story isn't concluded.
They could then point to the low ratings to justify the cancellation and hope that the new series will pick up some of the disappointed viewers who followed Caprica.
I fear however that people will not trust SyFy after all this fannying around to support even a cheap green screen space opera show.
The show was in my opinion unique and a bit too clever for it's own good.
Despite being set in the same universe as NuBSG it told a very different kind of story and kept it free of spoilers for the other series so people who enjoyed it could later move on to the earlier show set further along the timeline (something Lucas should have done with the PT).
The writing and acting were very impressive and it took chances with story telling (to the point where it alienated some BSG fans who preferred the combat lead earlier seasons of that show by being at odds with their expectations).
It just had the bad fortune of being handled in the way it was at the time it was by the increasingly ironically named SyFy.