Each season of LDS covers almost half a year of time, with every 13 episodes being half a year. With every 26 episodes is one year as a reference to most of the TNG seasons being around 26 episodes. If they stick to that, then Season 5 will end at 50 episodes, 2 episodes short of covering 2 years in-universe.
Overall, TNG and VOY had big dips in quality in their latter halves. True, the show might be the most popular at the time, but that just means tone and quality was more liked at that time and may not have dated as well. IMHO, DS9 was fairly robust, with a number of first-rate episodes, until its final season. Season 6 had few clunkers. VOY was beginning to waver in its 6th, but still had a decent number of solid episodes along with the not-as-good. Season 7 was way too dull too often. TNG's format change in season 5 had the biggest ratings, but seasons 1-4 have more stories that have seemed to have aged better. I feel season 7 was an improvement to 5 and 6, but as many writers moved the A-material to DS9, they chose to wrap up TNG (apparently there was to be an eighth season at one point, but with the TOS era ending in 1991 and Trek having DS9 on air and VOY in development, it made more sense to put the TNG crew on the big screen. Why Star Trek: TNG Ended (Was It Canceled?) (cbr.com) )
Paramount seems to have settled on five seasons being the new seven. If it was about uncertainity about the merger, then SNW would not have been renewed to begin with. It seems ridiculous that LD was cancelled, since it’s the cheapest show to produce by far. And Paramount has been having money issues for years, hence the merger talks. There were still legs to the idea. Yes, the Warp Core Five are due to be promoted and move on, but that would just mean that a new Warp Core Five could take their place. They could have kept the LD concept going for years, if they wanted to. And have anther animated show in the LD art style along side it too. If the upcoming season has an episode surrounding ENT, similar to how previous season had episodes based around DS9 and VOY), then logically they could have kept going referencing all the other Trek shows to get all of the Trek movie posters. I envision it as the following. S6 = the Kelvinverse; it never had a tv show, but is still an important era in Trek, could be considered episodic in its own way, and does have connections to the prime timeline. I think references regarding the Kelvinverse would be limited to Robau, Nero, the Kelvin/Einstein class, the Jellyfish and the Narada). S7 = DIS/ST (imo opinion, this is when the OG Warp Core Five should have move on to new assignments, and the show switches to new Warp Core Five – the next generation, if you will). S8 = PIC S9 = LD S10= PRO S11= SNW (third iteration of Warp Core Five) S12 = VST S13 = S31 That could have also taken the show right up to the Romulan supernova, and shown the loss of the Ent-E as well.
Indeed. There really is a strange fascination with this idea of, "Well, nobody asked for it?" Can someone please name a show that was asked for and was exactly what people wanted? The Next Generation was certainly not it, given it didn't feature Kirk or Spock. Remember that? Deep Space 9? Can't have Star Trek on a space station! Who asked for this garbage! The Motion Picture, with crew members acting extremely different from when we last saw them? Who asked for a Star Trek movie to be so slow, or Kirk to be a jerk? At this point, the sheer lack of imagination, and the expectation of TV shows to be "Asked for" is galling. We simply do not know what a show will do until it airs. If someone decided they had a Starfleet Academy story they wanted to tell I say bring it on.