I agree all around, they were so cheap they reused the explosion from the previous movie! I suppose "average movie-goer" might not of noticed, but I did immediately and it sucked.
It's just a poorly conceived scene all the way around. The moment they realized their shields were being breached they should have just pasted the BOP.
Or changed the shield frequency. Or rotated it.
One: they didn't know Geordi can see it.
Two: Geordi wouldn't be seeing it the whole time, so we the audience would have bought my suggestions.
I've aleays said the way to make that scene work is a shot gets through the shields, and Geordi rotates the shield frequency. The Klingons see this, and adjust, getting another hit. After several of these, Geordi realizes what's happening, rips off the visor and yells for a someone else to adjust the shields, but it's too late. You coulda had a tense buildup with that.
Even then, Riker should have just pulverized the BOP with an all out salvo the moment the first hit got through.
True all around, and the thing we're all agreeing on is that the battle needed more VFX shots to help sell it. I truly do believe that the idea behind it is okay, the concept of a tiny ass ship taking down the Federation's most powerful vessel is powerful image (just look at the Jem Hadar fighters taking down the USS Odyssey on DS9 for a good example). But we needed to see the speedy BOP running rings around the Enterprise, maybe taking out her phaser grids quickly to prevent fightback and evading the lumbering 1701-D's attempts to fire torpedoes at her, as it is the battle as shown is over within minutes, it makes it feel like an after-thought when it really needed to feel like a centrepiece of the movie. Consider that this was launching TNG on the big screen after seven seasons of restricted TV budgets, splashing out a little more money for model photography which would have shown us something epic we'd never have gotten on television surely would have been justified.