You get the feeling that the DS9 sets where Alien, like a species we can understand and share an environment with but has a few small preferential differences like Heat and Light levels and a differing cultural aesthetic so it wasn't too alien but it was close enough to give you a sense of uniqueness.
The "Moody Dark" we see on today's Ttek is just a really bad choice when it comes to art direction, in TOS they chose to wisper at some points in battle because it was to remind people of the Submarine Warfair films and TV they got for a while after WW2 and sell it as Ship to Ship Battle.
Today they chose Dark as they think it sets the tone, and it can but not in the way they do it the way they do make me think Starfleet has forgotten to change the bulb after the last ship station exploded.
They made a conscious choice to move away from the recognizable Starfleet look for the station while retaining a Trek feel, and it still comes off as kind of cozy and homey (once they clean up the mess of the occupation left over). It gives the feeling that they recognize the station should be on some level be built for humanoid aliens to live and work in, not just put together a stage front that looks dark and cool. Even the movie sets that try to keep the shiny Starfleet ship look instead feel too sterile and not enough like they're designed to be lived in. (Granted, Klingon ships were always pretty weird and like 'how do you live in this' but we rarely if ever saw what a space
station looked like, where Klingons would be expected to live long term)
Actually, I trust Janeway to fight for my behalf. If I ended up imprisoned or otherwise at risk, Janeway is too much a maternal figure to not bring down the ceiling to get me back.
Janeway very much cares about the crew, she just doesn’t go out of her way to show it.
Sisko strikes me as only willing to do that if you’re part of the senior staff/his immediate friends and cronies. If your just a random starfleet officer on DS9 that gets wrongfully arrested by the bajorans, he isn’t going to go to bat for you. He might raise a complaint but he isn’t going to antagonize people he deems more important.
As for Kirk, he’s an action man who just accepts the losses as part of the job. I’d completely respect him, but I wouldn’t want to be a red shirt on the next planet he visits.
Janeway will protect you from enemies because nobody gets to kill you but her. You're not safe at all if it comes down to a risk
she's taking, though. Nor can you trust her to act in your best interests. If it means stepping a toe out of Starfleet's regulations, it's a hard pass, even if it's to protect you.
I don't remember any time where Sisko failed his officers or the people in the station, though. He's basically a fierce papa bear to them all. Starfleet might dismiss an officer arrested by Bajorans because they want the wormhole, but Sisko seems like the captain most likely to fight back against that or give them the finger and do something himself. (Kirk might be the one most likely to give Starfleet the finger over someone he cares about, but he abandons and loses random nobodies on his crew like dropping crumbs on a table.) Picard is absolutely the one who will be of least use to you if you've been wrongfully arrested and Starfleet tells him not to intervene, though. He has the diplomatic chops to intervene, but he's most likely to give up if Starfleet says no.
I'm going to pick Spock as Captain by the way. Being a trainee under him on the Enterprise looks like it would have been a blast, other than the whole getting blown up by Khan thing which was Kirk's fault anyway. Also, once Kirk gets taken hostage by the Klingons, Spock pulls an entire rescue operation out of his ass and successfully infiltrates Klingon space with zero casualties. He's also less uptight in the movies than he was in the show.
Doctors is a hard one. I'm inclined to go with Bones since he's the most dedicated, and he's almost never taken out of action even when the ship is falling apart around him. The EMH would be my runner up. He's always on call, hyper competent, and because its Voyager he has more ridiculous technobabble solutions at his disposal.
Spock is a reasonably good leader. There's that whole episode where they're stranded on a planet without resources, a bunch of red shirts, and hostile enemies all around them. Despite the flagrant racist disrespect the redshirts showed, not only did he manage to get almost everyone out alive against all odds, but he came very close to sacrificing himself on the planet alone to ensure that his crew survived. The only problem is that he will absolutely cut his losses when it's time to cut losses. If you're a nobody and saving you would risk the rest of the crew, you're just dead.
The problem I have with Bones is that while he has the buff of being TOS crew and therefore has some of the most staggering feats, I believe he's also the doctor who most often fails to save his patients. People die on his watch all the time, and not just in a 'we have a full infirmary and people are dying off all around us' kind of situation. The EMH technically also has all of Bones' skills and teachings pre-programmed into him, so he's close to a strict improvement.
I like Jeri. It's a shame she and Seven have been so butchered beyond recognition in Picard. I constantly forget that I'm looking at Seven of Nine and not 'healthy looking middle-aged blonde action woman'. It's like the writers lost
all of Seven's actual personality and thought it was wholly 'hot woman' so filled the blanks with 'haggard cynical action woman with a temper and a connection to the Borg'. Has she ever had an analytical moment in Picard s1 or 2? I can't think of one. Her style of 'stoic' is entirely the wrong type in Picard, as well. I don't even remember her being 'ruthlessly efficient' unless you count 'murdering a dude by stabbing him in the face' as that. The closest I can remember to her being recognizably Seven is the flashback where she kills Icheb, just because she's sad over Icheb. Even then, it doesn't make sense why she'd jump to murder instead of trying to get him help even if it was unlikely to succeed.
I know Seven might be the type to determine that there was no hope and so the best choice would be to put him out of his misery, but you can't combine that with her acting in an extremely emotional way, because then she's clearly not accessing her Borg side.
Also- it's a classic failure to separate yourself from your creation, and a sign of a poor or inexperienced writer, that Patrick would not only see himself as Picard (when they are very different people) but openly admit to it.
