If they'd openly advertised that VOY would only have a main cast of 3-4, and the rest would be secondaries, would there be as many complaints over the lack of secondary characters and how only a few got treated to development in the Primaries? Heck, Xena only had 2 main characters and no one complained.
Yeah, I even liked "Chipotle" (as my roomate and I call him) and Kim. I mean, every character can't be awesome, and some must even be "lame" to balance things out. I didn't care for Neelix either, but I see what he offered to the show. Case and point: Voyager didn't go wrong. They made it home; and left us with some awesome episodes to re-experience on netflix.
I think overall Voyager was a good show, but if they weren't going to do a show about a ship stranded alone low on resources, they shouldn't have stranded the ship in the DQ to begin with. Voyager's approach to writing would have worked a whole lot better as an honest TNG clone. It did have its fair share of really good episodes but no consistency and no attempt to hide the blatant terrible attempts at ratings grabbings. Have you ever heard the expression 'A tactic known is a tactic blown'? Cheap attempts to increase ratings only work if it's not super-obvious it's a cheap attempt to increase ratings. My problem with the Lindsay Ballard episode had more to do with the resolution. It made no sense to me that just because she was revived and genetically altered she would have no problem returning to the people who mutilated her and calling them family. That's another of the general problems with Voyager's writing, it backed off from moral issues that TNG and DS9 confronted.
I'm not disputing the existence of borg babies. I'm just saying that the borg kids in VOY were annoying. (I assume you were being sarcastic, but anyway) However, I love how they velcro plastic "technology" to those babies in the TNG episode, stuffed them in a drawer and called them borg babies. Classic!
I liked the episodes that featured the Borg kids, Icheb, and Naomi...although I love VOY, it lacked a strong supporting cast and recurring characters. So those episodes where the recurring characters got a chance to shine were good ones in my eyes.
I didn't much care for the Borg kids. They weren't that annoying they were just... bland and not very entertaining to watch. Though that did make the little friendship between Chakotay and Icheb seem quite natural being they had something in common.
Well if you like them, you like them. If you don't, you don't. I personally thought the borg children were lame. But I can see that they may have offered something to the show that wasn't there before. When you stand them next to Alexander they seem positively marvelous. Although, I loved R Star's pointy comment I found Chipotle (aka Voyager's first officer) very tolerable. And Kim was one of my favorite voyager characters. I doubt many people share my view on that. It all boils down to taste. And, to me, the borg children taste like crushed up ibuprofen.
Unlike TOS, TNG and DSN who could explain away new crew members by transfers. VOY didn't have this option.
When Voyager was good, it was REALLY good to great, IMHO. And I would even venture to say a good 1/3 or better of all episodes were REALLY good, and another 1/3 being great or near great. But when it was bad, MAN was it bad! Case in point: Threshold The Fight Tsunkatse Elogium Favorite Son Tattoo Drive The Disease Fair Haven Spirit FolkThe 37s
That's not what TOS did though (and TOS was supposed to be a Deep Space Mission away from civilization), TOS would pull out new characters for episodes and act like they were always there and long crewmembers. No one minded this.
Yeah Subcommander, when it was bad it was BAD. BAD! BAD! BAD! I mentioned that earlier in the thread. And no need to list all of those episodes, you had me at "Threshold". But all-in-all, great show! Beats the hell out of ENT any day of the week. (And I even find ENT somewhat enjoyable).
The original Enterprise had around three times the crew of Voyager (150-ish to 430), so they had plenty to spare. Besides there will deep space stations (such as K-7 and others) where they can restock supplies and take on new personnel, Voyager never had that option (except then they took on a handful of people from the Equinox), so the producers/writers/PTB should have been far more involved with the ship as a whole. It would be easy enough to create 150 names and add to the series bible, so that the whole crew was accounted for from the very beginning. I've done it for a fanfic on a ship with 126 officers and crew, its not that hard--easier if you have a small team of people working on it. It would help add a sense of "realism" to the series, make the ship actually feel like a community bound together by shared experience and regular life-or-death situations. But then again, after Seven came onboard they couldn't be bothered to do anything with most of the series mains, so all the little people were pretty much screwed of getting anything of worth.
Plus of course another ship could rendeavous with the Enterprise and transfer crew, another option VOY didn't have. They simply didn't care about these details. They couldn't even keep track of how many crew they actually it seemd to go up and down all the time regardless of how many crew had died. I've played in PBEM's and we've always had a pool of NPC's to use. As mentioned above it getting to know more of the crew of VOY instead of random crewman number 6 would have added to the show, not detracted from it. On TNG we got to know the likes of O'Brien fairly well until he moved over to DSN. Speaking of which it had more developed secondary characters than some of VOY's primary characters. That isn't to say VOY didn't have it's momnets, but VOY could have been so much more, than it was.
The entire cast of the west wing was crew on Voyager at one point. Did you see them? The vessel is obviously larger than it seems.
So I believe, on one of the display screens. Much as the names of some of actors who potrayed The Doctor appeared on a display screen in TNG.
The Neutral Zone. http://virtualsky.tumblr.com/post/10878847125/doctor-who-references-in-star-trek-in-the-episode
Battlestar Galactica did the same thing though, whenever they needed new characters they'd just introduce someone from the rest of the fleet we'd never seen before. If VOY had been some bigger ship with hundreds of people, you wouldn't have minded not seeing the entire crew and having new characters appear when needed and disappear when not needed? "Single ship" types of shows work best when you have a really small crew (Farscape, Andromeda, Lost in Space) that all you need are 5 or so characters to run it, or a really big crew (NuBSG, Babylon 5, etc) that it's believable you'll never see all of them any it's okay to focus on the command team over everyone else. Along with the "We can't ever replace anyone if they die" part of the premise, this would mean keeping track of 150 characters and making sure none of them ever got injured or died or anything since not a single one could ever be replaced and the whole "We need every single member of the crew" part of the premise also holding them back. Contrast with BSG, where they could kill thousands of nameless faceless extras for dramatic moments without harming Galactica or its functions. Again, TOS did the same thing and no one minded.