If I'm looking at this objectively, I think you can make an argument there's 3 different versions of
Discovery they presented to the audience.
- Season 1, especially the beginning of season 1, has a lot of Bryan Fuller's ideas of reinterpreting everything about the Star Trek universe, from Starfleet to the Klingons. Whatever turmoil happened behind the scenes, you can see them pulling back from those ideas a bit as the season goes along and adjusting it.
- Season 2 feels more like proto-Strange New Worlds. There's still the overarching "oh my god, the fate of the galaxy is at stake" season-long story, but there's more individual standalone stories in the sense of SNW that build up to that.
- I would guess that if there's a "jump the shark" moment for some Discovery fans, it's probably the time jump in season 3. It arguably becomes a different show, where it has elements of Voyager (i.e., a ship far from the Federation it knows trying to find its way "home") while also taking on the premise of Andromeda (waking up in a future having to rebuild a fallen government after a dark age has befallen it).
I know I've seen comments from people who feel like season 3 was reactionary. That the time jump was the powers that be reacting to fans who complained about
Discovery not fitting within the timeline, so they moved the setting to get more freedom to do things storywise.
I've always felt that season 1
could have worked if they had been upfront with audiences from the beginning and said this is a reimagination of
Star Trek. It's NOT in the Prime Timeline. It has all the elements of
Star Trek but things are going to be different and may not be exactly the same as the way you remember it. And that would have allowed them to go in weird and different directions with the Klingons, the Spore Drive, and even the history of the Federation. I just think a lot of the hate against season 1 came in the form of distractions where people were like: "How are these Klingons? That's not a D-7!"
And I still think the Spore Drive needed to be weirder. If you want to introduce a piece of tech that rivals warp drive but exists in
Star Trek's past, put in some caveats which explain why not only the Federation didn't pursue it, but also reasons why all the other galactic powers didn't too. Using the Spore Drive should be something that takes a toll either on the ship, on the crew, or both.
Maybe people randomly disappear sometimes into the mycelial network. Maybe some people are psychologically damaged by a Spore Jump because their mind can't handle it. Maybe sometimes people rematerialize as a potted plant on the other side of the jump. I don't know, but I just feel like it should have just been more than Stamets needed to be pumped full of tardigrade DNA to make it all work.