It would have honestly been better if that Bajoran girl played by Zoe McLellan had filled the Chief of Operations role. You could have subbed her in, used her pretty much the way Kim was used and subtract the handful of episodes that focused on him [that were pretty much universally terrible]... Think about how much better both parts of Scorpion would have been if a character people actually cared about despite appearing in only two episodes, if for all the wrong reasons, had been the one infected by Species 8472's biological weapon.
"O'Brien must suffer" is also a consequence of the place Miles worked in. He was the guy with the most experience on Cardassian engineering, so if something broke on DS9, he was the dude who had the fixes in store, and that's a dangerous job. Additionally, everyone in his team had unfathomable levels of respect for the man.
Garak does it. That's his main source of income. It explains why he's also beyond schedule on tailoring trousers for Bashir.
Rick Berman allegedly said “someone’s gotta be the ensign”. Whatever. Point is, they made Harry into this weird eunuch momma’s boy who brags about being the night-shift manager,
and even that gets handed to a literal emergency screensaver program, who then gets to save the crew like three times.
That was it - Wang asked Berman what the fuck was up, why wasn't Kim getting promoted? Berman said "someone's gotta be the ensign" and that was basically him telling Wang to fuck off.
Plinkett: His hands are too slow to input the right equations. Kim's general incompetence leads everyone to their doom...
You joke, but the guy doesn’t matter enough to help OR sabotage Voyager. Neelix almost annihilated the ship with cheese. Neelix got laid more than Tom Paris and wasn’t even trying, Harry’s just this wallpaper in the background. You forget he’s there.
They really tried to pitch Tom as some kind of Kirk/Riker pussy slayer, but Robert Duncan McNeill is the opposite of a locker room guy. So instead they pivoted into “nerd who’s having more fun than you."
There was a weird idea of male hotness in the early 90's. Kevin Bacon was the heartthrob lead in Tremors even though Fred Ward was clearly manlier.
STD felt like the Starship Troopers training video, except instead of satire they’re heroes, now clap. So after crawling through all that industrial filth I was stunned just to see some humanity.