I do find it strange that some people who said they hated Dal and can't stand him on Prodigy (which is now canceled so I guess they won) are the very same people saying they love Boimler and Mariner.
I hated Dal at first, but then came to be a great character. People's views can change.
This was a fun episode and if LD is bleeding viewers I sure haven't heard about it. And even if it were...so what? Some of the best Trek has had small audiences.
Some of the best Trek of the current era for me was
Star Trek: Prodigy, which apparently had a small enough audience to cancel it, so this is very true.
This episode is popular to a lot of people apparently. For those who don't understand my confusion and the viewpoint of those who don't like Lower Decks, try to imagine if you wake up one day and look on your local Star Wars website and find out that Jar-Jar Binks is suddenly one of SW's most popular characters, there's a whole tv show about him, the crossover episode of Andor where Jar-Jar appeared is considered one of Andor's best episodes, and if you say anything remotely critical about the episode (not to the point where you're hazing Ahmed Best towards suicide of course, that was horrific that people actually did that) but just minor stuff saying this show and this character aren't really that great, you're told off as saying you don't like Star Wars and that you're not really a Star Wars fan.
I don't think there was ever any level of widespread hate for
Lower Decks that you are implying here. And the reactions to the negative opinions are really about people going into persecution complexes, or just saying things that are not true... like the show canonized that LD is in a world that's animated.
There was one person here that joked about if you don't give this episode a 10, you have no soul or something like that. Maybe I misinterpreted that and it was a genuine statement of the poster's beliefs about others. Even if that were the case, it does not mean it's anything at all close to a universal position, or even a significant fraction.
I'd also like to point out that your analogy is flawed as well because Jar Jar Binks is unpopular with a
part of the fandom. People who are younger, some of whom are my friends, grew up with Jar Jar and liked him when younger, and other than his appearance as a racist caricature of sorts don't have any issue with him. I always like to say, when I watched
Star Wars Episode I, I found Jar Jar annoying. But I also found C-3PO incredibly annoying and a useless character, but because I didn't see the original trilogy until my late teens, I didn't see him as a beloved comic relief character from my childhood. My Jar Jar-hating friends were aghast. It's about perspective.
Anyway, I liked the episode. I don't give episodes ratings, but it was fantastic fun. It felt really fast, in a way faster than LD usually feels to me, probably because over time watching that show I came to be able to adjust, and this threw me. But it was fine after a while.
With regards to Tendi and Rutherford appearing in live-action, I imagine getting them in for a live-action cameo would have been a lot of work for not a lot of output, perhaps? They'd have to construct a headpiece for Rutherford, and some kind of Ortegas-esque wig for Tendi (not to mention the green make-up). And while Boimler and Mariner are WAY taller in SNW than they appear to be in animated form, Cordero and Wells are way shorter than their characters, and would probably really clash having them so much shorter compared to their friends. Rutherford is especially a lot taller than the others. Though a throwaway line about space-time differential would have been fine for me. In fact, since we've seen the LD crew next to Riker, we know that their heights are already off "canonically".