IMHO star trek Voyager is not as bad as everyone says

Ditto when I bought the DVDs last year. Roughly half (the last half)
was brand-new to me, so it was money well-spent in my humble opinion.
It was entertaining at least.

I don't think Voyager is as bad as everyone says. On an
episode-to-episode basis, it's almost as good as TNG (see below). And

eponymous cowherd...

That makes two of us.

after I had rewatched the discs twice, I ultimately decided to keep 3
out of the 7 seasons..... same ratio as TNG had.

rob.ocelot...

In TNG's case the best seasons (3,4, and possibly 5) coincided exactly
with the point at which the production team accepted outside scripts
(and in some cases spec scripts without an agent middleman). The later
seasons and all subsequent series the production team circled the
wagons and relied mostly on staff writers. The last few seasons are
just painful to watch, with a few bright lights.

Voyager, on the other hand needed to break away from the self-contained
episode format and really drive home the bigger issues associated with
their being separated from the Federation. The balance between their
need for short term survival versus the longer term reprocussions of
violating directives and laws that might one day come back to haunt the
Federation in 100 or 200 years when they officially send exploration
ships to the DQ. The early seasons where Janeway holds true to
Federation principles and ethics are made all the more hollow by the
fact that she pulled a massive cheat (both ethically and temporally) to
get the ship home in the finale.

Interestingly, "Year of Hell" was proposed as an entire season arc
that would not have had a cheat-reboot at the end. It would have made
Voyager far more interesting as a redmption story: They start out all
high and mighty with good intentions, get trashed during the middle
seasons (Year of Hell) and resort to non-Federation tactics to survive,
and then finally get home by sticking to the Federation ideals.

Voyager is not great, but it's not horrible either.

SEASON-BY-SEASON COMPARISON
/ PERCENT OF GREAT EPISODES:
TNG(x) - VOY(x)
73%(3) - 73%(3)
58%(6) - 65%(5)
54%(1) - 50%(2)
50%(4) - 50%(4)
46%(7) - 38%(1)
42%(5) - 35%(7)
36%(2) - 31%(6)
===============
46%(_) - 44%(_) - all 7 seasons

(for comparison DS9=74 and TOS=70%). See? Voyager is almost-as-good
as TNG, at least from my viewpoint.

:-)

Geordi: "How'd you like to come see my warp core?"
B'Elanna: "Oh puleeze. Shove it up your ____."
Geordi: "Why do I not have any success with women?"

Barkley: "You want to use my hologram-B'Elanna?"
Geordi: "Nope; been there; done that."
LeahBrahms: "I feel so violated."