I would have liked to see Petofi at some point in the distant future, maybe after 1840, or maybe even in some other flashback to before he lost his hand. But, by the time 1897 was over, we had just had Petofi as the primary villain for around 80 episodes. I think 1897 was sort of growing too long and stale by its end (although I thought the episode where Garth Blackwood first appears is one of my favorite of all time-- tons of stuff happened there), and re-introducing Petofi would have been sort of a continuation of that.