The only really good Star Trek series I saw was DS9. It was darker, had longer story arcs, religion and fully developed characters. There was even a scene that illustrated this, where Captain Sisko was talking with an Earth politician and telling him that the problem was he lived on Earth, a paradise, and couldn't understand the war and problems those near DS9 faced.
DS9 was really good. But all the shade it threw at the underlying premise was still to reinforce it, not break it. Where any other show would take e.g. the above case of the Federation governance being out of touch with needs of their constituents near the border, and deconstruct it six ways to Sunday in most cynical of fashions, DS9 made the paradise something good, if fragile, and worth fighting for, worth aiming to have here - whether "here" is out there in lthe frontier colonies, or back today in the 21th century real-world. That's why I still say it was an aspirational show, if much darker, and worked to reinforce TNG instead of deconstructing it.
The only really good Star Trek series I saw was DS9. It was darker, had longer story arcs, religion and fully developed characters. There was even a scene that illustrated this, where Captain Sisko was talking with an Earth politician and telling him that the problem was he lived on Earth, a paradise, and couldn't understand the war and problems those near DS9 faced.