Because nothing VOY does is accepted by the audience? Regardless of in-show justifications or otherwise? I mean, they showed that there were other aliens tougher than the Borg and got slammed as "Heretics" for doing so.
Ahh, so here we are at the inevitable turning point of all these threads, where you turn the discussion over to how oppressive we critics are for comments allegedly made who-knows-when by who-knows-whom. Your very own signature Godwin's Law.
In other words, you won't try to say "Of course not, if they said that the Borg ships in VOY were all smaller and weaker I'd buy that explanation!" Thus proving my point: Nothing VOY could do would be accepted.
Okay: If they said that the Borg ships in VOY were all smaller and weaker, I'd buy that explanation. In fact, I can still buy that explanation even though it didn't exist. Like I said, that's part of suspension of disbelief... You can retcon the story to make it make more sense, but you can't claim that that was deliberately a "subtle" part of it in the first place. That's ludicrous. No, they tried to make us believe they had tougher, scarier ships, but then ended up making them feel less threatening. That answers the question in this thread's title.
I think many of those that say Voyager weaken the Borg aren't IMO considering replay value nor the quality of HD. The Borg eps. viewed as stand alone eps. IMO are suspenseful and often full of drama & action, add the HD quality to it and just hearing the Borg is a thrill all over again. Voyager was always a show geared to bringing back the casual viewers TNG once had. I think the producers and writers of the series always had this idea in mind of rewatching the series as mostly stand alone eps., which IMO still keeps the awesomeness and fear factor of the Borg intact.
Spoiler: MASSIVE IMAGE Anwar is so far right. The Intrepid was scaled to 344 The Station ended up at 2400 meter wide....should be 2500 but close enough. That is how the Galaxy is often scaled to the station. I'll scale the station to the Galaxy in the picture if you like.
^ Your massive image is distorting the web page. Can you please resize it and provide a link to the larger scale? Thank you. The Borg as a faceless entity, a mass collection of minds that you couldn't see, made it a very unsettling enemy. That an away team could beam over and the drones would essentially ignore them, because they're "too weak" to be bothered with, was just unprecedented. In First Contact and in Voyager, they changed the Borg. It was no longer the faceless enemy. The introduction of the Queen turned them into something different. I could understand if they created another "liason", a drone who would basically speak for the Borg but in an unemotional, robotic way... this would work. But the Queen behaves like a human being with full emotion. And then, you have these nearly indestructible Borg cube ships where ONE cube took out 40 starships at Wolf359 as the initial premise, only to change whereby a single vessel like Voyager can stand up to one of them. They "weakened" somehow... it wasn't explained. There was no mention of Borg specific weapons being used that had remarkable improvements over previous weapons. And lastly, you have the assimilation thing. In TNG, they assimilated technology but destroyed humanoids. They learned how to adapt Picard into Borg form. Perhaps this could be considered their realization that assimilation is possible. But the nanoprobes as a means of assimilation was a huge leap. There wasn't any explanation for it. Also... the time it would take for someone to become assimilated varied a lot. In some cases, you see it happen within a minute, in others it takes hours. I preferred the TNG Borg. They were more threatening, menacing, insidious... I liked the assimilation idea, but wish they'd have introduced it differently. That it would be more selective, not focused on assimilating everyone found. And done in a more believable way... that it was more of a hijacking of the brain functions, instead of "rewriting DNA". I really never liked how carelessly Star Trek treated DNA manipulation.
TNG Borg were too ill-defined to be anything more than a one or two story creation. I'd have defined them totally BEFORE "Q Who?" was even aired. And I'd introduce the 8472 aliens IN "Q Who?": Q would teleport the Enterprise into a battle between both of them with the Borg losing. It would show that they are strong, but they aren't the strongest. That's another problem, Q said they were just ONE of many races out there but everyone assumed they were the number one Galactic threat when they were never meant to be.
The fact that they were the only one Q brought them into contact with was the very reason that they became the number one threat to Alpha Quadrant forces. None of those other hypothetical threats were made aware of their existence as a potential victim.
So many good points have been brought up in this thread. I think when the Borg were first thrown into the mix (in TNG), they were intended to be something like space "zombies," meaning they were probably thrown in for shock value and interest. However, unlike zombies, instead of inexplicably reanimated deceased corpses rising and chasing people through graveyards for unknown reasons, what you have is a culture whose existence requires commandeering living beings' bodies to modify and animate in whatever way suits them. That made the Borg unique (IMHO). Someone else brought up how Locutus was used as a "mouth piece," yet was not at all an individual while in the collective. I feel like this aspect of Borg life was not emphasized enough - that dead drones could be just cast away by the collective like used up batteries without any remorse, whereas most living beings (in Star Trek, at least) do what they can to help one another survive. So, becoming Borg is, in addition to losing your identity and freedom, becoming a very disposable and insignificant tool. When Q first forced contact between the Enterprise and the Borg, it was because he didn't believe the Federation had what it took to take on the Borg. I see the Borg as kind of a mix of the space-zombie-shock-factor and as another challenge (I guess both similar and dissimilar to Farpoint) presented by Q, which the Federation was eventually successful in overcoming - or at least successful in staving off disaster repeatedly. One thing I was never fond of was the whole Unimatrix thing. However, its redeeming factor is that it was mentioned to have begun with the re-assimilation of a single drone. If that drone was Hugh, of TNG, I like the concept of the Unimatrix better, but it still really doesn't make much sense for deception like that to be possible in something like a collective consciousness. I think, if you view the Borg as kind of a comic-book-type-villain, they completely win. But, if you try to pick the concept apart and examine the details to try to make the Borg make sense... you might become disillusioned with them in a hurry.
Then they should've had some discussion about it at some point, something like "These Borg creatures were once considered out greatest threat. Nowadays we know that they're just one of many." OR TNG should've just done the sensible thing and introduced other races as powerful or more powerful than the Borg after BOBW.
They weren't, so why would they say that they were? Of all the threats Q alluded to, the Borg WERE the only actual threat to them because the Borg were the only ones who knew about their existence and had any reason to come after them.
Because it gave the audience the totally wrong idea that the Borg were supposed to be the biggest threat to the Galaxy, instead of just one race out of many.
I've explained twice now why that in fact wasn't a totally wrong idea, it was the truth. There was no point making any bigger deal out of powerful threatening races than just having Q mention them, if said races had no reason to be a threat relevant to the Federation heroes that the show focuses on. It makes sense that these threats aren't mentioned again until their home turf is revisited by Voyager. I also don't see why you're pointing a finger at Q Who for not having a whole backstory prepared way back then, when they weren't even expecting a recurring role. Cardassians weren't well defined until DS9, Andorians weren't until ENT, and so on. The responsibility for fleshing out these and the Borg fell on the creators of DS9, ENT and VOY respectively, because they were the ones who chose to make them recurring. Not TNG and TOS.
I concur on the first point. On the second...he says this I presume because he knows the episode CONSPIRACY was supposed to be a lead up to the Borg and intro of a sorts but they ended up changing it for a more mechanical threat.
The Borg were intended to have a recurring role beyond "Q Who?" in the first place, so again it falls to the writers for not defining them properly. It WAS a bad idea to make the Borg the number one threat in the Galaxy, mainly because they're so boring once you get past the "Hive Mind" thing. They're only good for 1-2 stories (and history backs me up), and as such the best strategy when having created such a dead-end foe is to introduce other threats of their scale only NOT make them so boring. 8472 were a step in the right direction, they just needed to be introduced earlier in TNG.
Those original plans that you and Saquist refer to had already gone down the toilet by the time Q Who was produced, so they have no relevance to what actually became "the Borg". The incarnation of the concept that we actually ended up seeing in Q Who was not intended to be recurring. And in any event it wouldn't get VOY off the hook. They independently made the decision to bring them back as a recurring villain, so the responsibility to handle it well was theirs.
Maybe if the audience hadn't been utterly close-minded to the idea of new aliens in the Delta Quadrant...