I thought DS9 was better than B5. I'm probably very biased though because I watched DS9 first, and I went into B5 with high expectations because I'd only ever heard it described as "DS9 but way better." I also didn't watch season 5, but I may go back to it someday.
I love B5, but all of your criticisms are very fair. I still think its narrative holds together better than DS9, but it's imperfect and has aged poorly in many ways.
The CGI was a novelty at the time, but it was made on a bunch of networked Amiga 500s, so...
look, the poor little Video Toasters were doing their best. As I said earlier it would have been nice if they could have preserved the source files and re-output at HD quality, not that it would have suddenly been realistic looking, but at least it wouldn't be fuzzy. I suppose AI upscaling might be an option.
Story wise, the issues all come down to JMS himself, who is a good writer, but not as good as he and many other people thinks. He wrote all but a handful of 5 seasons worth of episodes, and it shows.
He's too autistic to write non-cringey romantic subplots. And he's too much of a literal boomer shitlib to write historical or political metaphors that aren't ham-fisted ripoffs of Rod Serling morality plays (he was the story editor for the 1980's Twilight Zone reboot). It's always 1954 and monstrous Joe McCarthys are always unfairly prosecuting innocent artists.
The show probably would have benefited from just a little tard wrangling here or there on the teleplay side.