Thanks for your explanation. I will give my thumbnail overview of my main problems with THN:
1. Wesley Crusher was Lost in Space’s Will Robinson, only Billy Mumy was more convincing. When he didn’t keep off the grass and was to suffer the death penalty on the pleasure planet with selective enforcement, Picard should have demonstrated his commitment to the Prime Directive.
2. Troi was elevated to the same level on the bridge as the Captain. She was essentially a walking mood ring (Ferengi: “ “Heh-hehhh, Captain, I believe we can make an arrangement that will benefit BOTH of us! hee-hee!” Troi: “I sense deception, Captain!”)
3. Q puts the members of the Enterprise on trial for horrific crimes, and as a good liberal, includes McCarthyism as worthy of being included in his top ten. Then he mentions barbaric Capital Punishment. Picard: “We did away with that Barbarism eons ago!” Oh really! Wasn’t Spock up for the death penalty for a Code 4 violation with the death penalty the consequence (he was helping Captain Pike). Botching basic continuity in EPISODE 1 to score cheap political points told me much. If a casual watcher as myself can pick out such an obvious contradiction, it was done on purpose.
4. The Holodeck was a cheap device to compensate for the lack of new plots (and to cut down on the number of recycled plots). As in TOS, happy coincidences put the action into settings for which Paramount had sets. I’m surprised someone in the holodeck didn’t wind up in Laverne and Shirley’s brewery.
5. Brief glimpses of skinny male members of the Enterprise briefly seen wearing mini-dresses in the background. Those belong to Janice Rand. Don’t take her clothes!
6. They go to all that trouble to have a separate flyaway deck for family members and rarely incorporate it into the story. It was mainly an excuse to have Wesley the Pest in the story. Inexcusable when we know the Enterprise’s history of near disintegration on an almost monthly basis. It is tantamount to putting your wife and children into a sidecar of a WW I motorcycle, knowing you could release it before you hit the Maginot Line.
Again, these reflections were formed after only a handful of episodes, and a college pal and I watched it with pizza and beer to give it the MST3K treatment, taking a break from another Mothra movie.
They revisited McCarthyism in a 4th season episode called "The Drumhead" in which an overzealous prosecutor (actress Jean Simmons) tries to find some saboteurs. Since she is based on the left's idea of McCarthy, everybody is innocent and she eventually includes Picard in her "witch-hunt". Really pathetic.
Troi never really worked for me, but I guess she was no more out of place on the bridge than Bones was on TOS. I guess they felt the captain needed another sounding board.
The holodeck is described by Roddenberry in his plans for TOS, but they didn't develop it until TNG. It was kind of a lame idea, but they did a few interesting things with it. It usually didn't feature in the plots unless something went wrong with it and in merged into reality. One episode had a crew member who was using it to act out his fantasies with some of the crew members (something I could see happening). (The British comedy series Red Dwarf did a classic episode involving the merging of a virtual reality game in an attempt to root out a virus in their ship's computer in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse").
Even though the world of ST: TNG seems to be some sort of communist utopia, they made the Borg Collective into a nightmarish race that would fit in with any of the major 20th century commie regimes.
The show definitely improved after season one, and really hit its stride in season 3. There were duds along the way, but several really good episodes. The 2-part "Best of Both Worlds" featuring the Borg could have been a movie.