The thing about this last ep., which I finally saw, is that both sides were quite right.
Tyrol was quite right: the people working in the refinery ship were slaving away in completely inhumane conditions, child labor was being employed, and there was no hope of escape.
Adama was quite right: the fleet had to maintain readiness and discipline, or the fleet would be in danger. That bit about "obeying orders they don't want to" harks back to the first confrontation between Tyrol and Adama, regarding the order to seal the doors and trap Tyrol's men rather than risk the fire spreading to more of Galactica -- if the order had been disobeyed, the whole ship might have been lost, with catastrophic results for the human race.
I don't think anyone was really out of character -- they were just looking at the problem from two different points of view, and they were concerned about two entirely different sets of dangers. Tyrol was thinking of the people under his immediate command. So were Roslin and Adama -- but their command was much, much larger.
Frankly, the fact that the fleet still retains any vestiges of democracy is remarkable, let alone the somewhat clunky but functional republic that they have. Only 40,000 people, swept up at random after an inutterable catastrophe, low on qualified personnel of all stripes, scraping the fragments of a detonated barrel for supplies, massively outgunned... democracy is clunky at the best of times, let alone under true horror-story conditions!
Think of it this way: Baltar raises the question of whether anyone not named Adama will ever command the fleet. Which in turn raises another question: is anyone not named Adama capable of commanding the fleet? Tigh could command militarily, but no one other than Adama really trusts Tigh, and Tigh would frak up the civillian side of things almost immediately. Who else do you have? Gaeta? Agathon?
So it becomes a geneologically inherited position because, by accident of history and plot necessity, the only two surviving humans in the entire universe capable of commanding the fleet happen to be father and son.
Moreover, Roslin was very true to character in that a) she's pissed at Baltar and arrested the first refinery commander because of that; b) she's got a history of bucking the current to help a union; c) she's got extraordinarily tough decisions to make and sometimes messes up; d) she comes to something resembling a compromise at the end of the ep. because she makes use of her personal relationship with Tyrol to get preconceptions out of the way and see that he's making good points. Roslin is the woman who holds the fleet together because of her remarkable balance -- balancing extreme and competing needs, balancing velvet and steel, balancing her personal desires with her duties to her people, balancing lives and everything about life magnificently.
