WRT Voyager, that show frustrated me. It could have been great. It should have been great.
This is from memory and I’ve not watched it in years so I may be doing it a disservice, but,
The original premise is brilliant. You’ve got the cream of Star Fleet thrown together with a bunch of rebel fighters. There’s a real opportunity for conflict as they’re forced to work together. That lasted, what, two episodes?
Maquis aside, Janeway is surrounded by the best staff Star Fleet have to offer. Yet she knows more about the respective posts than any of them. How many times do we have scenes where say the Chief Engineer, the best Engineer in Star Fleet, tells her something can’t be done and she comes up with something he hasn’t thought of? Every other week? Gah.
Then there’s her propensity to make friends with everything. “Ooh, an alien killing machine, let’s see if it wants to be friends. It’s probably just misunderstood, poor thing.” She made friends, repeatedly, with the Borg for gods’ sake. Talk about neutering one of the franchise’s best antagonists.
It had moments of brilliance. The Species 8472 plot line was spectacular, right up until they defeated them (by making friends with the Borg, natch), but it spent way too much time with Seven of Nine learning about humanity, irrelevant twaddle with Leonardo Da Vinci, or being all twee and cuddly with Niaomi Wilder (who must surely usurp Wesley Crusher as “most annoying Trek character ever”). The hell with that, go blow some shit up.
Compare with DS9. Once the writers worked out after two seasons that, in fact, no-one in the history of the world ever gave a tuppenny shite about Bejor, we got the Dominion Wars, the Defiant, Wayoon, Garek (who must be the one of best characters ever), Section 31… Fantastic stuff.