Hey, when I was 12, Wesley was pretty awesome.
As an adult, I still find Wesley annoying (if, ironically enough, less so). Data is still pretty awesome. Riker has grown on me in a way that I don't think I would have been capable of appreciating as an inexperienced kid. He is a nuanced character that you kind of have to have lived a little in order to get. My opinion on Worf is largely unchanged, though his stock benefitted retrospectively from his appearances on DS9. Geordi got better with the benefit of time. Troi still bugs me; I find her one-dimensional with only occasional chances to shine. (Probably not her fault. It seems that the writers just didn't know what to do with her, other than consign her to stereotypical, damsel-in-distress and love-interest tropes. Her mother, by contrast, is a fantastic character, if a bit of a lightning rod amongst fans.) Beverly Crusher grew on me a bit -- especially in contrast to Dr. Pulaski, whose odd, technophobic Data-bashing felt really out of place in the 24th Century. Picard went from being "pretty cool" to being, unquestionably, the best thing about the show.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.
It seems to me that it is a general problem that a multi-writer show like Star Trek can only carry along certain types of nuance. I suspect there's a lot of writers that, given six or seven episodes to play with, could have done fantastic things with Worf or Troi... but that's not how it works. They also have problems with change... especially in the movies (which I do more clearly remember), they had a real problem with Data. By the time of the movies he'd made a lot of progress and grown a lot as a character, but in a couple of the movies (particularly Insurrection) it's like he's regressed almost all the way back to the first episode of TNG. The "Pinocchio" aspect of the story carried along, but the already-existing nuance had disappeared.
Multi-writer stories are hard.
One of the benefits is, for lack of a better word, scalability. A single writer would take forever to write 100+ cogent, consistently great, full-length episodes of a TV show. Since TV series' fates are always in flux, you can't afford a primetime series with only one writer, who becomes a crushing bottleneck if any changes in volume need to be made. Writing a great TV episode is hard, hard work and takes time. Now imagine writing 12, or even 22 of them on an insane production deadline!
On the other hand, some shows and formats work really well with a single writer/auteur. True Detective is famous for having been entirely written and entirely directed by just one writer and one director. Now, True Detective was a miniseries of only 8 episodes, and at that scale, a single writer is more realistic. I doubt you could have produced a primetime Star Trek series with only one writer and one director.
An interesting hybrid approach is what I'd call a staff structure with a clear "visionary" at the helm. This is sort of like what we saw on Battlestar Galactica: a show with a full writing staff, but one or two writers who basically dominated the process and authored the bulk of the series. MASH is another good example; Larry Gelbart clearly exercised strong, authorial control over the show, even though he didn't write every episode.
This latter approach tends to work the best, in my experience as a fan and as a former TV person. But it can have its difficulties and drawbacks, all the same. Sometimes there are limits to the imagination of even the most creative individuals. If you're relying too much on a strong auteur type, and he or she gets writer's block, or gets sick, or becomes extremely difficult, you're SOL.
For these reasons, I'm not sure B5 really paid off on its promise and, at best, took a considerable willingness to overlook the weaknesses.
I'll grant you that every sci-fi show seems to have its bad episodes, and many of them occur early on. DS9 was not immune to that effect.
At some point I pledge to give B5 a more serious attempt. But I feel I should do that sooner, rather than later, because the show's looks are not aging gracefully.
The last 1.5 seasons of B5 were a letdown though. They had problems throughout with actors leaving abruptly, imminent cancellation, etc. that threw the plot arch off track a little. It could have been a lot better. The six or seven movies that were produced after the show's run... couldn't get through more than a few minutes of those.
It is worth the initial slog to catch the cross season story arc about the First Ones, the Shadows and the time travel stuff.
I think what puts folks off with B5 is that some of the sets and makeup are a a wee bit iffy, but the story itself is pretty damn good once you get past that.
I do recommend persevering because there is a very good deep story being told in B5.
Seasons 2-4 comprise an outstanding story arc. Londo Mollari, the alien with the upward-pointing hair, goes from Falstaff to Macbeth to redemption, and that's far from the main story.
And the central character -- head of the station -- was changed after Season 1, to a figure who was more heroic and more funny at once.
I thought that while JMS oversaw all of B5 and wrote the broad story arc, he did not write most of the episodes.
Creator and showrunner J. Michael Straczynski wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of Babylon 5, including all 44 episodes in the third and fourth seasons;[63] according to Straczynski, a feat never before accomplished in American television.
I recently went back and watched some TOS and was really surprised to see young her on the show.
I didn't care for Pulaski, but I kind of get her character, in retrospect. In comparison to Crusher, who was the motherly, caring doctor that we all wish we had, Pulaski was the doctor who was in it for the science. She never really seemed friendly, she wasn't especially caring, and she didn't mind if people disliked her, but she was good at the medicine and the science.
I fancy that this was to offer a bit of continuity with McCoy's fear of Transporters.
I do agree that it felt out of place, but having given it a bit more thought: The fact that Data was unique (ignoring the as-yet unheard of Lore) sort of makes everyone else's easy acceptance of him slightly odd. The doctor (with intimate knowledge of the fact that we're all just very complicated machines) should have been Data's lone champion against his numerous naysayers.
Final Mission http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Final_Mission_(episode)
The First Duty http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_First_Duty_(episode)
Other than that he is pretty terrible.