Pro: The cast is outstanding. You just flit from character to character and say, "Oh, she did wonderful work," or, "He has such presence," or, "She did everything she could to save that script short of throwing it on the floor and giving it CPR." There are no weak links. Everybody's got tremendous talent and everybody's giving it 100%. If you want to make the case that this is the most skilled cast
Star Trek has ever had, I won't get in your way... and if you want to make the case that this is the most skilled cast in a new scripted drama on television today, I think you can make a good case for that, too. Regulars, guest stars, bit parts, even
fake parts... it was a consistently amazing cast across the board.
CON:
Star Trek has never had such abysmal writing. From the turgid, loooooonnnnng log entries that frame far too many episodes, to the insane season arc that didn't make sense at the plot level and never cohered enough to resonate at a thematic one... from the way individual scenes are constructed by smashing two characters together to try to get one of them to emote until you can call it "development," to the way nearly every episode is structured around some dumb
twist or other instead of just telling a gorram story...
Star Trek has
never found its writers' room in such dire need of an overhaul. TNG S1 had several individual episodes that were worse than anything in DSC S1, it is true -- but TNG S1 also had a few
good episodes, and DSC's highly serialized, highly continuity-porn-driven structure meant that its failures at both the macro and micro levels tainted
everything. (Also, TNG S1 came out in 1986. There is much less excuse for being this bad in the Golden Age of Television.)