I think maybe I expected too much before it started. It definitely did have more gritty realism than the others (TNG does look very 80s now ). The strange thing is if I look at all the different parts - the characters, the scripts, the way they handled being before the 1960's, yet after the 2000's, and still before the 2400's etc, and individually they all seem like excellent ingredients for a series. But I just never really got the bug for it for some reason. I always had this feeling it was going to get somewhere but never really got there. And the same went with DS9. With TNG and Voyager there were episodes with the Borg, Q, Species whatever, time paradoxes etc etc that I can still remember clearly.

Maybe I'm just getting old and senile in my thirties