is a homage to Star Wars, isn't it??? I've never heard this mentioned, but it must be: text crawl, big bad guy spaceship looming over little rebel space ship, lasers blasting. I'm not crazy, am I?
It was the same style as what was done in "Emissary" as well. Which also featured a big bad starship blasting away at a smaller vessel (a bunch of them).
And Star Wars' opening crawl was a ripoff (excuse me, homage) of old Saturday matinee sci-fi movie serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
DS9 did a similar thing for "Emissary" to provide context for viewers who weren't familiar with TNG. So I don't really see much of a deliberate Star Wars influence.
At the point Caretaker premiered it was Berman, Piller and Taylor. Braga was just one of the writers/producers at the time. So it was one of their ideas.
I just thought it was a text dump to provide a bit of info just in case new fans of the series weren't watching DS9, and never looked into it much more than that.
So basically you'd want to see the captain's log turn into text crawls? That's basically the purpose of both... to dump exposition onto the audience.
I liked the opening text crawl in both Emissary and Caretaker. Brings in new fans and gets them up to speed on what's going on in the Trek universe at this point.
I always assumed it was done simply to give some background information. So Chakotay was the first character to appear in the series? Never thought of that. And Janeway was the last, correct?