"You have to like it, or you're not a real Star Trek fan!" they explained. Yeah . . . no. NOPE. TNG survived for two reasons. First, they gradually removed Roddenberry's hands from the levers of control. Second, the scripts got consistently better through S2, and by S3 the cast had settled into their parts, and the stories were solid. S3-S5 ended up being terrific. And while S6 and especially S7 had a few wobbly ones, the scripts were there. DS9? Similar trajectory. Things were kinda wobbly right up until the Jem'Hadar menaced Sisko and Co. on a Gamma Quadrant away mission. At which point the series (and the characters) locked on target and didn't flinch. Some of the best writing the franchise had ever seen occurred between DS9 S2 and DS9 S6. Excellent scripts. And the part that doesn't get talked about enough? Both TNG and DS9 worked hard to stay faithful to the future history as shown in TOS and the Shatner films. There was precious little deliberate retconning, overwriting, or ignoring. In fact, the opposite was often true. Each series bowed deeply and tipped its hat to the past, even going so far as to give us gems like "Relics" where Scotty himself returns, and "Trials and Tribble-ations," where DS9 cast pay a well-crafted and deceptively seamless visit to one of TOS's most famed episodes. The only modern Trek to do anything like that is probably Lower Decks. But as a friend of mine pointed out Lower Decks is like a Rick and Morty animation comedy that off-duty Next Generation crew would kick back and watch; laughing at how Starfleet life is done up for yuks. SNW? Apocryphal. Re-writing the canon. STD and SFA? Also apocryphal. Literal alterna-history within the future history. And badly written, with poor characters which are often deliberately obnoxious. Worse perhaps even than Wesley Crusher. And that's really saying something. No Trekkie is obliged to like and consume ANYTHING the studios shove at us. We derided the fifth Shatner film for being bad, because it *was* bad. A very mediocre script, shot on a mediocre budget, with mediocre directing. So disliked in fact that Paramount brought Nicholas Meyer back to do Undiscovered Country so that the Kirk cast of yore could go out on a W, not an embarrassing L. TNG Insurrection? TNG Nemesis? Poor outings. Scripted more like TV two-parters that never made the cut, and were fairly shoved at the audience because we will pay to see anything with Star Trek written on it. Again, the answer is: NO. Just, no. A series or film is either quality, and respects the lore, or it doesn't. And there's precious little that's deliberately disrespected the lore that I'd call quality. And I am certainly not going to waste my time paying for streaming services just to watch series by people who've already proven in prior outings they have no clue what they are doing. And proudly flip off us older Trekkies. I will happily re-watch my DVDs of TOS, TNG, and DS9, thank you. Hell, I might even invest in sets of VOY and ENT, just to round it out. I will never invest in any DVD, Blu-Ray, nor 4K, of anything with Kurtzman's hands on it. And I gave away my DVD of 2009 JJ Trek. After the abysmalness of Into Darkness and Beyond. The second attempting to re-tread the Khan plot, and the third just . . . being dumb. Really dumb. You only get to lay so many bad eggs before nobody comes to your hen house anymore. Doesn't matter how much loyalty remains for prior incarnations.