I don't have anything really against the topics in lots of modern Star Trek, and I like a lot of it.
Lower Decks is great, I loved Prodigy and what I have seen of Strange new worlds was quite good too. Even some parts of Picard Season 1 and 2 was good (and it got so much better in S3).
What I can't watch though is Discovery, this show is just, in my opinion, so bad written on so many levels. A waste of time and money in my eyes.
I tried the first three seasons and stopped.
I am happy for everyone who likes it, it is just not a show for me and that is fine.
But all of the new shows are so much worse than the old shows (TNG and newer, I am too young for TOS/TAS), by miles. Maybe it is nostalgia (I started watching TNG as a teenager) but I don't think so. Sure it has it's own cringe at times but for me the quality of the writing and storytelling is on a completely other level.
Go watch the "casino in the void" episode of TNG and come back and talk about how much trek sucks now. I personally enjoy the campiness of the episode, but it was played straight, and it was terrible.
Casino in the void always had the vibe of a TOS script transplanted into TNG, the few episodes that I watched from TOS all had the same campiness and stage acting.
I think that's what makes it so terrible, it stands out like a sore thumb.
Bad stories reliably end in TNG. Usually, they're done after a single runtime. In Discovery, the awful plots smear across multiple episodes, if not entire seasons.
Big arcs can work in Star Trek, but they have to be good. Discovery is like if the writers decided to make Pen Pals into a 12-episode saga. If something doesn't hit, it takes forever to rectify. Then, since they decided to start as a prequel, they did the star wars thing of irreparably tarnishing the stories that came before.
First seasons often get a bonus for me when judging a show, it all has to find together and that often needs some time.
That's why I gave Discovery three seasons to win me over, I really tried to like it.
Arguably they were still figuring out the tone, and how to revive a 20 year old franchise while not retreading the past. Not claiming there aren't some duds, but later 90s Trek benefited from TNG cracking the "formula" and sticking to it.
Compare a modern spiritual successor to TNG like The Orville, which, despite a rocky premiere, just crushed it within 5-6 episodes, and kept crushing it, because they didn't have to put so much legwork into defining the tone of the show.
The Orville... Still the best Trek of the modern era.
It is the opinion. And to be honest I was really tired and it first started as a more topic related text and then evolved into this due to my sleep drunkenness.
Strange how it sometimes goes.
But I am sorry for the off topic posting.