...even DS9 suffered some from the Starfleet Must Be Bland ideology left over from the non-conflict Roddenberry days.
Well, let's be clear. I think you should mean the DS9 writer's interpretation of the Roddenberry ideology. I honestly don't think they (or many of the writers on TNG for that matter) ever really understood what he was getting at and in fact shot themselves and the ideology itself in the foot by perpetuating this Starfleet Must Be Bland myth that they themselves created out of ignorance.
Now I can't fault them entirely because the first season of TNG was so badly written in terms of characterization that I can see how they would have gotten that impression. However, Maurice Hurley seemed to understand the ideology pretty well and, in my opinion, really made it work in the second season. Michael Piller seemed to understand it pretty well too (ie. he got the philosophy) but he's also primary responsible for reintroducing the bland characters aspect in season three.
Now as far as this topic goes strictly, you really have to take the formats of the shows into consideration if you're going to talk about character development. Most of the shows were episodic and didn't really allow for character development that could span between episodes and seasons but that doesn't mean the character development was bad. You just have to consider it within the framework of the individual episodes themselves. In this case, it's more an evaluation of whether characters seemed believable and three-dimensional or experienced any kind of growth within a specific story. Episodic television is more like an anthology of short stories than a novel.
In some ways, DS9 is worse than the other series in this respect because they made a concerted attempt to be serialized but weren't allowed to go all of the way with it so it can have the effect of coming off as being half-assed if you put it under scrutiny.
With all of that said, I think the character development in TOS, TNG, and DS9 was quite good. As it's been mentioned, the only characters actually featured as primary players in TOS were Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and they did a lot of wonderful things with all three of them. The movies picked up on this and did a lot with Kirk and especially Spock, but poor McCoy got a little bit of a short shrift.
TNG was an ensemble enterprise (no pun intended) and I think they did quite a lot with most of their characters as well, at least starting in the second season. There were some glimmers of character in the first season but not many. Picard and Data and Worf of course are the stand-outs across the entire series but they did a lot with Riker as well, at least up until the fourth season. The wink links are Crusher and LaForge, who never really were that well fleshed out and ended up being a lot like the secondary characters in TOS. Troi, on the other hand, I think was actually quite well written but was just not focused on very much.
This post is getting a little long so I won't go too much into detail on what I think of the rest of the shows. I'll just say that I think DS9's character development was about on par with TNG (ie. as good as it got in television in the early nineties). A few characters really shined, most were well written and a few slipped between the cracks. DS9's strength of course was it's ability to have more serialized storytelling (which, as i said, also had it's disadvantages) and it's strong secondary characters.
VOY and ENT on the other hand pretty much exclusively had bad character development all around, which unfortunately stood out a lot more in comparison to their well written contemporaneous television shows. Of the few characters that got their moments of good writing there was usually no consistency to back it up.
Jeez, for someone who mostly lurks and occasionally makes the odd drive-by post, that was a pretty damn long post.

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