I think it was pretty much inline with your Halloween/horror genre witches, which if you keep that in mind, you can hand wave a lot of stuff. But the way they presented it sat better with me than the pagan gods killing people on Christmas (which is too bad because the actors were funny and interesting), because I felt there was some wiggle room for true witchcraft even if you may disagree with me on that point. My problem is that they emphasized too much that real witches are this variety and then you have the fluffy pagan people that are the New Agers that are harmless. That dicotomy doesn't work.

But I think there is still room to move in between. They really only showed witches that were duped into Satanic/demon focused stuff. There are people that claim to be witches that do dabble in this sort of thing. The Catholic church warns against stuff like that. So these witches were more of devil-worship/occult problem than witchcraft. They failed to make the distinction that witches don't worship the devil, etc.

I see it as a mislabeling issues which doesn't make it any better. But when I walked away from the episode, I didn't feel like all witches had to be evil and selling their souls. I got the impression that Sam and Dean *think* that all witches are like this.

Now the auidence? That's a different story. Everyone might not see it that way and might walk away thinking all witches are supposed to be this way which is false. And that is where must of my discomfort comes from.