Every series devotes a few episodes almost entirely to one character. I think the fans of Discovery hate the comparisons with Orville because they hate being reminded that Discovery can do so much better and are confronted with the evidence of that with new episodes of Orville every week. Hopefully the writers over at CBS learned something
Having an episode that focuses on a character isn't the same as character development. By definition, character development is taking a character from point a to b to c and that journey is permanent and impacts who they are.
Trek hardly ever did that. Having a Riker episode and a Harry Kim episode doesn't change anything for those people. It just put them in a generic adventure where they were the star for 45 mins.
The DSC characters have changed, evolved and been revealed over the course of just the 7 episodes we've seen.
So, you can criticize the lack of focus on individual characters (which is a bit unfair given that there's been 7 fucking episodes to this point) and that's fine...but you don't have a leg to stand on with character DEVELOPMENT.
The fans of Discovery hate the comparisons to The Orville because they are stupid, meaningless comparisons meant to cause conflict between two very different, independently functioning science fiction shows. Not because they remind anyone of anything.
Sorry breh.