TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Your point is well made but for the record O’Brian wasn't an officer and never went to the academy. He even jokes about having to call Nog ‘sir’ when he becomes an ensign.

There is a line you see quoted from time to time the ST:TMP novelization, which I understand Gene Roddenberry had a real hand in crafting.:

We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us. We submit ourselves to starship discipline because we know it is made necessary by the realities of deep-space exploration.

He seems to have struggled with what his vision for a future society would be, versus the realities of making a sellable media property in the late 20th century. He posits that our Starfleet friends are actually socially conservative space cowboys by the standards of the UFP, which makes it easier for the audience to identify with them without compromising the rest of his post-scarcity utopian vision (e.g. that same passage indicates that James Kirk was partially named after his mother's first "love instructor"). However, it also means we're seeing a bizarre subculture of quasi-exiled psychological luddites who take on the eldritch horrors of service in Starfleet in return for not being slapped down into conformity.

It's clearly not a guiding principle for how Starfleet is generally portrayed in ST media, but it's interesting to think of them in terms of being distinctly apart from the rest of humanity while dedicating themselves to protecting it and expanding its understanding of the universe.

I mean, there is the whole Keiko x O’Brien x Kira x Shakaar Edon situationship.

Bashir x Leeta with their open relationship at the end

DS9 had a lot of changing romantic relationships compared to other shows.

Yeah I love the show after but ds9 vs any other shows is a depth vs breath. Ds9 had some of the most complex characters in all of star trek. Because of that push and pull between the writers and Berman. Those first few seasons let you do character driven stories and flesh out the world. Then that paid off in dividends in the later seasons when they starting doing plot driven serial stories. Plus they were not to drop a epistolic story right in the middle of a longer story arc. To give the audience a breather/ palette cleanser.

Unlike today where each season is a bloated movie where the plot is find the mcguffin that will save the universe every season. Like a crappy railroaded D&D campaign.

Eh. It's still Star Trek. I think the hangup on traveling is silly. The wormhole serves the same role as a narrative device as the warp drive. The original idea, before the Dominion War came along, was that the station would regularly have the same kind of weekly "planet of the week" encounters as other Star Trek shows. And the series does have many episodes like that, episodes like Meridian. I'm referring to bottle episodes, episodes focused on a single novel planet, culture, or ethical dilemma.

The idea was that because the station is at the mouth of a newly discovered wormhole, that the station would get that story mechanic while the characters stay in the same spot. Instead of the entire crew visiting new planets, new planets would effectively come to them. Delegations from new worlds would pour through the wormhole, providing opportunities to explore new cultures and civilizations. And Federation explorers could go through the wormhole and have their adventures shown on-screen or be discussed back on the station. An example of this can be found in Captive Pursuit.

Narratively, a wormhole functions the same as a warp drive. The story just brings the universe to the crew, rather than the crew to the universe. But narratively it makes little difference. You would think Trek fans more than anyone would appreciate that motion is relative in space.

(I didn't directly addressed you, just the opinion formulated in the meme).

I mean, I get that the show could feel a bit slow and light in the first two seasons sometimes. But on the other hand, the first thing it does is introducing Picard's perfect foil as the new commanding officer by questioning Picard and his role during the Borg crisis.
Most interesting start of any Trek show if you ask me.

Also the themes the show worked with, the character developement, even the continuation and expanding of TNG topics like Klingon and Ferengi culture and society.

BRB, wrote myself into wanting to rewatch.

Gotta punch 'em, just to be sure.

Agreed.

(It's Academy that's the worst)

I feel TNG and Voyager never outright justified it, but rather found a way to minimize and debate it and try their nest to end up on the most moral objective whereas sisko let the ends justify the means and then said he'd do of again lol.

we only saw like 3 minutes of seven as an official capatain. she wins by technicality here.

I can’t pretend that Starfleet isn’t a thinly disguised military

Disguised how? It's literally Federation's military.