I remember this to be an oft repeated complaint about the Bajorans, even during the show’s original run. It’s why the writers largely stopped writing episodes about “boring Bajoran politics and religion” after season two. And still to this day you’ll often see this brought up as a reason why the first two or three seasons weren’t as good as the later seasons, when the focus shifted to the Dominion. So I wouldn’t exactly call it an “unpopular opinion”.
Personally I was always fascinated by the Bajorans and consider basically all Bajor-centric episodes to be very strong, especially during those first two years. There’s so much stuff to find interesting about them, and it’s wonderful to see how much of it holds up and is still relevant (or even more relevant) today. Themes of religiosity, the dangers of a theocracy, religious fundamentalism trying to bring anti-science to schools, terrorist as (anti-)heroes, the ramifications of decades of occupation and racial oppression — it’s frankly incredible how topical and interesting this show was. It also helped that three of the main Bajorans on the show were portrayed by insanely talented acting legends like Nana Visitor, Louise Fletcher and Camille Saviola. I couldn’t give a fuck about how they looked almost like humans. You could argue this makes them and their stories even more relatable to the human viewership.
I also have to say that I think it’s problematic to say they “always seem to play the victim card when it comes to the Cardassians”. To me the Occupation of Bajor was rather obviously a stand-in for the real world Shoah, with the religious Bajorans as the victims of the fascist state Cardassians. IIRC, the occupation lasted 50 or so years, they plundered the planet’s resources, enslaved the Bajorans and probably killed millions of them in what we would surely call a genocide. How could they not constantly bring up that fact, especially when the Cardassians still presented such an omnipresent danger? Anything else would have been completely unrealistic. Plus, I’d argue it’s unfair to characterize them that way, when we had several Bajorans who turned out to be perpetrators doing questionable things during the occupation themselves.
And finally, I’m not sure how much more interesting it would have been to establish the Cardassians and the Bajorans were once the same species. I think what they actually did on the show — show us that the Bajorans were a much older species that used to be technologically and culturally more advanced than the Cardassians before they besieged them — was a much more interesting notion.
