Season 4. Characters are learning and growing and carrying on. Ends with a big event and a satisfying open ended narrative conclusion.
Season 5 undoes every ounce of character development and abandons every single character that isn't Michael Burnham. Throughout the season various characters keep dropping with no explanation, slowly whittling down. The tacked on epilogue for the entire series does not have a single line from any Discovery-crew main character that isn't Burnham. She gets 20 minutes of bullshit about her that ends with the most wildly unsatisfying narrative tie-in to something else. A tie-in that undoes everything that happened since Season 3 and leaves a future that is objectively depressing and hopeless. And that's not even talking about the fact that Burnham does something in the first episode of the Season that is worse than mutiny. What she does in that first episode is so overwhelmingly fucked up that it proves she didn't learn a singular fucking thing.
It is fucking mindboggling to me that the final season was greenlit.
Sorry to hear about your disappointment in the new season. I'm still working my way through DS9 and hope to later start watching ENT .... so I've got a lot of decent content to go through.
I was considering watching DISCO but I was sort of thinking what you said would happen would happen and it looks like it did. I'll get to it done day just because it's Star Trek but not any time soon.
I was worried that one of the developments of modern TV series especially on the digital platforms is to not build long running series because it doesn't make them money. Audiences in general are lazy so the average viewer just wants to watch something they have no history to, know no background and is something that is just completely new. A long running series with five, six or more seasons is too much for someone who is getting into it from the start. Most new audience members will skip the long running series or ones with big fan bases and go watch some short running series they can watch from the start and end quickly.
I'm thinking this is what they did and will do to the new Trek shows from now on. They won't last beyond a few seasons until they are just killed off. And if it's a show with a large loyal fanbase, the best way to kill it is to sour the whole thing with bad writing and bad storytelling to just get everyone to stop watching it.
The first 2 seasons of Disco are worth it, in my opinion, since it segues to Strange New Worlds. I had no idea that Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds existed. Once I heard about them, I checked them out and enjoyed them a lot.
Don't forget The Orville. Spiritually more like Star Trek than Discovery for the most part.