By you, I'm sure. Those of us who were actually paying attention would remember that a single Borg Cube once chewed through a fleet of forty starships on its way to Earth; people who remember this would not expect a single starship lost in space on the ass-end of the galaxy would all by themselves discover how to defeat the Borg single handedly.
You'd think that, but it wasn't the case. Once the Borg were mentioned the audience was asking for a confrontation.
Speaking as a member of this proverbial audience you keep mentioning, this does not appear to be the case. Again, I'm sure YOU were asking for a confrontation, but I doubt that expectation is universal.
Besides, TV shows are written by writers, not by their audience's assumptions.
Technobabble is technobabble, it gets derided no matter when or how it's used.
Except when it's used properly (in which case it is barely noticed as technobabble).
For the 8472, it's just double standard/show prejudice. If they had been a TNG or DS9 creation no one would have any problems with them or how they could fight the Borg. It's being a VOY creation that blackmarked them.
Probably, though not just by association with VOY. Basically, it was entirely the wrong time and place to introduce a new species as a foil for the Borg. 8472 might have worked as a standalone adversary (in PLACE of the Borg, which Voyager would then never encounter for some reason) but not as an attempt to out-badass the ultimate badass.
And after First Contact, the Borg were known to have a controlling mind over all Borg and that they weren't solitary predators.
Right. Which is where the REAL problems started, as I stated earlier, since the introduction of the Borg Queen reduced what was an otherwise very interesting and very frightening threat race into a slightly dopier version of the Doctor Who's cybermen. As long as the Borg Queen was running the entire collective, the Borg were basically reduced to the innept zombie-like minions of Mrs. Skeletor.
The only meaningful fix would be to assume that different Borg ships operate different ways and that one just happened to be controlled by a Borg Queen; in that case, the ship that attacked in FC would be the same cube from BOBW, after the last substantial fragment of it spent years regenerating. Even if this couldn't be inserted into FC, Voyager writers could suggest as much with a handful of throwaway lines.
VOY needed a plot device to explain why the Borg didn't just destroy them and how they'd get through the core of Borg space, the answer being that the Borg were fighting someone stronger than them that kept them from destroying VOY.
A plot device would have been unnecessary. They could have (and should have) fallen back on some TNG conventions that stipulate the Borg would leave them alone until they identified the ship as "something they can consume." Then it's a game of cat and mouse trying to sneak through their territory without attracting attention and avoiding them whenever they do.
Of course, somebody at Paramount thought as you do and assumed the audience would have been somehow disappointed if Voyager didn't at least TRY to defeat the entire collective, so they dreamed up another random badass species strictly for the purpose of castrating the Borg.
It was a bad idea based on a false assumption that, in the end, didn't work.
Firefly and B5 worked because those guys were their own original creation, and not villains from another series being recast in a different role.
But the Borg had ALREADY been modified from their original incarnation by the nonsense that was the Borg Queen. If we're going to play it that fast and loose with the nature of the Borg, you could just as easily make them anything you want them to be; as silly or as serious as you desire. There was no need to try to make the Borg consistent with FC, or even to reduce the Borg to a more mundane superficially evil nemesis, except that the producers SERIOUSLY underestimated the sophistication of their viewers.
Most Trek fans DO hate the Descent story...
This is the part where I remind you to speak for
yourself and not for most trek fans. I, for one, have never met a fan who didn't (hell, I know a number of
non-fans who like Descent).
VOY needed a central enemy, like BSG did with the Cylons, but unfortunately everytime they tried to create an original foe they could do whatever they wanted with, the audience hated them
Actually, the audience simply hated what they DID with the Borg, which was talk them up to a force of incredible destructive power and then ever-so-slowly water down the Borg's destructiveness and persistence until they became, in the end, kind of lame.
Now that you mention BSG: recall that Galactica spent the entire first season running from the cylons, with the only "full on confrontation" being a hit-and-run attack on what was intentionally described as an isolated fuel refinery. The Cylons were never explicitly implied to be more powerful than the colonials, and yet the audience clearly understood the subtext that it was very risky to try to engage them in Galactica's situation.
The Borg, on the other hand, are described as tactically superior to Starfleet in every possible way. With the exception of yourself, I seriously doubt anyone who was watching Voyager by that point would have expected Janeway to try and take on the collective. Nor, really, would they have found it particularly suspicious for Voyager to outwit/outmaneuver/boobytrap one or two cubes by way of running for their lives. Mainly because, again, anyone who knows about Star Trek knows that the Borg are not someone with whom to fuck.
To dumb them down just to make a confrontation possible diminishes the entire series. If you need a race with which to have such a confrontation, you're better off picking someone like, say, the Kazon Nistrim, whose ships are large and numerous, but primitive enough that a single starship could probably fight them off. And wouldn't you know it: despite their similarity to the Klingons, most Voyager fans didn't particularly mind the Kazon storylines.
