Why are these lock-stepped into the "usual" Star Trek formulas for their plots? Why not branch out, make Voyager a different type of genre, appeal to another segment of the scifi audience (romance/relationship) that is buying books? The mere fact that this issue is still hotly contested and argued should be a sign of interest, don't you think?
This is probably a big part of the disconnect between those who want Janeway alive and those who are indifferent to it. I have no interest in relationship drama and if Voyager were to go that route I can imagine it would bleed alot of readers. Would there be enough new readers to make up for those who left? I don't know.
I think it is pretty clear that the "traditional" Star Trek fan is not happy with Voyager in general and Janeway in particular. The series was always different, and the reaction at PB has been to ignore those differences in favor of the tried and true instead of realizing that they were writing for a new audience. Their stable of writers was not comfortable with it, and the writers hired to write it have not always been able to strike a balance that appeals to readers.
Voyager has always been about relationships--its starting premise was focused on how the Maquis would mix with the Starfleet crew and ship, which is relationship, pure and simple. It continued to look at that with the struggles of Seven of Nine to acclimate to non-Borg life, the inclusion of new aliens on the ship (including the Borg kids), etc. The ship was in a fluid environment, always meeting new aliens, and so the longer arcs were inside the ship, between the crew.
In addition, Voyager always had a high humor factor, something that the PB novels never adequately embraced, preferring to go with the serious tone of previous series. Voyager provided us with some of the best humor in all of Trek and yet this seldom showed up in the novels.
In tough times, it is scary to branch away from the "tried and true" plots and characterizations that seem to keep the current readership happy, but innovation and change is essential to growth and to the addition of new readers. It is a shame that the editors and writers didn't use Voyager to branch out and try something new.
My concern is, at this late date, the "new" audience has given up on Voyager ever being written in the spirit of the series. Case in point: the current novels labeled Voyager don't even have two of the most prominent and popular characters--Janeway and Tuvok. Readers I know who are new to the books are simply stunned to find out that Janeway is not just absent from the novels, but dead. If I'm a Voyager fan and spend my hard-earned money on a book only to be disappointed, what is it going to take to get me to part with more money later on? The simple answer is to write Voyager the way the readers want it.
As someone who once participated in a fan-driven attempt to redo Voyager in a manner that adhered to the series' original concept and premise, I feel confident in stating that, whatever Voyager may have originally been intended to be, what it actually became was a more intimate version of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the emphasis was on the adventure of the week moreso than on sustained character development; Voyager's characters certainly saw their share of long-term development (for the most part, anyway), but not nearly to the degree that the series' original premise/concept/intent specified.
Something that I think the post-finale Voyager fiction has done incredibly well is to find a very comfortable 'middle ground' between what Voyager was/became and what it was originally intended to be, putting equal emphasis on both the 'adventure of the week' aspects of the series as well as on the prolonged and sustained character-based storytelling that was specified/indicated in the series' original premise/concept.
It is one thing to say that you would have liked the post-finale Voyager fiction to be what the series never was, but by the nature of what tie-in fiction is, there are limits on how much the writers and editors of said fiction could/can do in fulfilling that wish.
It sounds to me, judging by this comment, that you really don't understand the nature of licensed/tie-in fiction, or 'shared universe fiction'/collaborative fiction writing in general. When you're dealing with a shared universe of any kind, one of the imperatives/rules of the medium is that you maintain continuity, even if you're dealing with something that is largely episodic. If someone establishes that a character acts/behaves in a certain manner, anyone else who is going to use said character must, by the very nature of 'shared universe'/collaborative fiction writing, write said character in a manner/fashion that is consistent with what other writers established about said character. This is something that Voyager both succeeded and failed at at times throughout the course of its 7-year run, but which the writers and editors of the Voyager post-finale fiction have attempted to rectify as much as they are able within the constraints imposed on them by what Voyager was.
