Neelix is painted by some as creepy and incompetent-despite him being extremely helpful-almost desperately so.
He helps counsel Seven and B'lanna, asks Tuvok for security training(you know so he can be of use during emergencies or combat situations), provides information and such as long as he can(and outright does something less than ethical out of fear when he is at the limits of his knowledge), he uses his ship a few times to help the crew out of jams.
Neelix can come across as annoying, but he never acts out of malice, at most he doesn't respect people's boundaries or cues(sometimes), and genuinely wants to be as useful as he can be.
That's a good character in my book.
Serialization was the future of television, like it or not. Whether it hurts Trek in the long run remains to be seen.
See, Trek does best when its episodic morality allegories or exploration of sci fi concepts and such. While DS9 did well with a serialized war arc-it was in contradiction to the Trek of yore.
One example where serialization or rather the expectation of serialization hurts is Voyager's living witness-its a really great episode, one of Voyager's best and up there with the best overall-but people talk about the mobile emitter because they expect everything to be entirely consistent(or at least explained) and don't just appreciate the episode-or even talk about its themes or characters or whatever.
The Berman Era was the most consistent in quality, that's for sure. The Roddenberry and Bennett Eras wavered wildly and the Abrams and Kurtzman films and series are at best inconsistent so yeah, the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT Era was the most consistently enjoyable and dialed into making the best stories possible(even when it failed).
The Berman era produced a solid baseline-you have good episodes, average to forgettable, classic "great episodes" and the occasional memorable "bad episode". Meaning I can sit and watch say three episodes of Berman trek-TNG, DS9, and VOY in a night, and it not wildly different in terms of how good it is.
Janeway was a competent and effective captain... most of the time. She certainly did make some questionable decisions.
Janeway cared about her crew's welfare and was more than willing to fight on their behalf, she also didn't make a beeline to earth but instead took advantage of her situation to explore, do science, make diplomatic contact, you know Starfleet's purpose-she was just going home doing it, instead of going outward away from home. If I were on Voyager I would be very confident in Janeway personally.