Trek writing has never been consistently good. Half of TOS is unwatchably bad. TNG sucks until Riker gets more hair. DS9 sucks until Sisko gets less hair. Voyager’s all over the place (even though it’s my favorite). Enterprise is mostly bad. Only the even numbered TOS movies are good. Only the first two TNG movies are good.

I say this with a genuine love of Star Trek, but the quality of the writing has varied greatly over each individual series.

Which is one of the reasons why Discovery and Picard at least are problematic (I haven’t seen Academy).

As you say, a lot of the old stories aren’t really that good. What happens when they had a bad story, or maybe less ‘bad’ and just didn’t engage with you? New one next week.

With Discovery and Picard? Well the whole season is the story, so if it doesn’t engage with you, you are pretty much out for the season.

Personally, I never felt there was really enough narrative “meat” in their stories to warrant a season long arc, and so it felt a bit stretched for time for the perceived “a story needs to fill a binge” market.

Strange New Worlds primary win was returning to episodic, to give a story a chance to shine or fail in a digestable amount of time and move on. Was at its weakest when Season 3 kind of devolved to a weird arc.