DS9 is about the only 80s/90s Trek series with an almost completely watchable 1st season, though.

I kinda wonder in retrospect if they shouldn't have done Voyager and Enterprise the other way around, make Enterprise first, then do the stranded far from home thing.

Voyager's premise lends itself to being told as one continuous story, because...it IS. One trip, back from the Delta quadrant. Except in the late 90s they still wanted to make adventure of the week episodic TV. Especially early in the show, they ignored the premise almost entirely.

Enterprise's premise is a return to the weekly adventure format; a ship named Enterprise wanders around and encounters shit, now with 38% more obvious thirst. That's suited to episodic adventures, but it's the early-to-mid 2000s, the era of TiVo and DVD box sets, the heyday of binge watching. Serialized TV was soon to become all the rage, Paramount knew it, which is why they tried to have not one but two overall plots. The first two seasons had the "temporal cold war" which I'm still convinced someone in a writer's room blurted out without thinking through what it meant. The resulting plot was a bad guy and a good guy kept showing up to explain to Archer why they couldn't explain to him what they were doing. That wasn't working so they went full Starship Troopers. "I'm from Pensacola, and I say KILL EM ALL."

The prequel Enterprise would have done better in the late 90s and the stranded far from home Voyager would have done better in the 2000s.