I was enjoying season three, and was happy to pretend it was the beginning of the show. The characters have calmed down and they've moved away from the familiar setting the showrunners were butchering -- a move they should've taken from the beginning. The grim'n'gritty feel that's been increasingly present since Enterprise works better for a post-apocalyptic Trek than the "Golden Age" of the 2250s through 2400s. Unfortunately, history tends to cycle from rise through fall to rise again. I narrow my eyes at the stylistic erosion of the period from First Contact on up (as seen in STO). I like more what we saw on Voyager (Equinox, Prometheus) and less what we saw in the rest (Enterprise-E, Steamrunner, Sabre, Luna, etc.... I'm not a fan of the "slab nacelle" style. I give a pass to the Akira and Norway because I otherwise like them a lot, but...). I prefer the vision of the 2390s we saw in TNG's and Voyager's finales over what we're seeing in Picard. I like the botion that the Dominion War hurt, but part of how the Federation won was by not sacrificing their moral core -- that being how Odo was able to go be an emissary to the Founders and not say, "No, you're right, the Solids are a bag of dicks."
I had come up with the notion, as a campaign setting, for the Star Trek RPG back in the early '90s, that Something Had Happened™ to subspace, rendering warp travel impossible for long enough things had broken down to some degree. A century or two. Long enough that the characters were the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the people alive during, but not so long everything got forgotten and lost. The characters' ancestors had been surveying a planet when the Thing Happened™ and, after all attempts to communicate or leave the system were thwarted, they put the ship in a parking orbit, mothballed it, and set up down on the planet. One day, some FTL-boosted computers kick back in and they realize whatever happened is clearing, they use what has been passed down and taught to them to revive the ship, and set out to see what they can find out about what the heck happened. Slow burn. They find an abandoned starbase and scavenge for parts and information, they find a derilict ship hanging in space between star systems, partial crew aboard, dead, and logs showing others had left in shuttles years before over dispute over what to do... Eventually they start finding cut-off colonies where society collapsed with no outside contact or support, and eventually core worlds who had managed to keep some semblance of civilization going with sublight travel between near stars. The "Federation" is still a thing, but a scared shell of what it once was, and so on from there.
I've apparently been tapped into the Jungian subconscious since 1987. Everything from a ship named Stargazer (in that rough configuration) months before "The Battle" named Picard's former command (I was a SilverHawks fan at the time) up to Runabouts named, successively, Orinoco and then Rubicon. Fortunately for me, the third name I came up with for my headcanon adventures hasn't turned up yet on the shows or in ancillary material. Not gonna say it, so I don't jinx it. So I'm not at all shocked that the basic premise of that year-long RPG campaign now seems to be the rough premises for the new season of Discovery and the upcoming Prodigy.
But that took a hit after all the blatantly eugenicist (in the real-world sense) talk of Humans being inherently, genetically predisposed to being dicks, to explain the Mirror Universe. I'm hoping they walk that back in future episodes, by saying "No, that was that one person's belief and they're wrong", but they haven't yet and that's worrying. I was really, really primed to like this season after the first couple episodes before that hit.