Voyager's position in the last couple of seasons was very near the Delta/Beta border, but they never actually reached the border before "Endgame," so Beta never really came up except in the few instances Laura linked to. "Renaissance Man" seemed to be the clearest reference to the fact that
Voyager's path was toward the Beta Quadrant.
I'm glad to see there's a transcript search tool again. There used to be another one, but it's been defunct for years. Or is this an updated version from the same people?
I feel like if the producers ever got a chance to go back in time and edit old episodes, they'd put Earth right at the centre of the Alpha Quadrant, as the quadrants have only been relevant for long distance travel.
There's no need. The Alpha/Beta dividing plane is defined as passing through the center of the galaxy and Sol, analogously to how the dividing line between the Eastern and Western hemispheres was defined as passing through the Greenwich Observatory in London back when the British Empire dominated the world. It makes more sense for the dominant power making the maps to make itself the center of the
whole thing, the definition of an axis of the coordinate system, than to define something else as the axis and put itself in the middle of just one half or one quarter of the whole.
The tendency to refer to the whole Federation and its neighbors as the "Alpha Quadrant" even though much of it is in the Beta Quadrant has a real-world analogy too -- the fact that we refer to Europe as "the West" even though most of it is actually in the Eastern Hemisphere. (And there are analogies on smaller scales too, like how "Greater Cincinnati" incorporates a couple of Kentucky municipalities right across the border from Cincinnati, Ohio.) That kind of technically imprecise shorthand is part of how cartography tends to work in real life, so we should welcome the fact that similar inconsistencies show up in Trek. It makes it feel truer to life than if it were all perfectly consistent and logical.
