The layout of the E's con and ops stations was a step backwards in both in-universe and production terms. The D split the consoles and put their legs on the outside. In-universe, this made sense because it gave the captain an unobstructed view of the viewscreen. In production terms, this made sense because it gave the camera an unobstructed view of the captain. It was a brilliant design, but the E abandoned it.
The -D bridge was designed to be viewed through a square-shaped frame, which is why seeing the captain's legs and having an exaggerated second level was important. The -E was built for widescreen, so cramming everyone into different vertical levels in the center of the frame wasn't needed or desirable. You can even see this happening to the -D in Generations. The command pit was raised, the tactical station given a chair so Worf was lowered, and the secondary stations were moved to the sides, downplaying the original ones in the back. The visual organization of the bridge was squished to be more horizontal. And you couldn't see Picard's shins anymore, even with an open channel running down the middle of the bridge.
And remember, when the -E was designed, the producers were coming around to the opinion that the viewscreen was a needless affectation and eliminated it entirely. Granted, that got reversed in the next film because, as pointless as everyone looking at a giant TV that shows empty space 95% of the time was, looking at a blank wall was even more pointless, but it was the first step towards the modern era of having the viewscreen as a literal window to justify its prominence and the bridge's position on the ship, and being filled with status displays to give it some kind of function to explain its centrality to the bridge's organization (the real reason being that having everyone look toward the front of the bridge instead of at their consoles on the walls makes it easier to get all their faces into one camera shot).
My final objection to the E's bridge is admitted a matter of taste and I don't have a strong logical argument to back it, so I'm separating it into its own post.
You're really not supposed to reply consecutively rather than putting everything you have to say in one post, and you're definitely not supposed to do it as an entirely contrived section-marker.
On the D's bridge, there was a step and railing (the wishbone) behind the command chairs of Picard, Riker and Troi. Same with Voyager's bridge: there was a step and railing behind Janeway and Chakotay chairs. In other words, their command chairs backed up to something. However, the command chairs on the E are "floating" -- i.e. there's nothing behind them. This looks weird to me.
The worst part of the -D and Voyager bridges is that they cram the captain up against an artificial waist-high wall that blocks their view. The whole point of making the bridge round is so the captain can see any station from their chair. The captain can't see anything from their chair on -D (except the viewscreen, which isn't telling them about the operation or status of the ship). On Voyager, the captain can at least see the science and engineering stations on the side, theoretically, but they're smaller than the other stations, about as far as humanly possible, and their main consoles are facing the wrong way for the captain to see what's actually being worked on. It forces the main characters to be constantly standing and walking back and forth across the set, which may be the intent dramatically, but if your goal is to not allow people sit down so your staging is more dynamic,
don't give them chairs.
I realize, technology unchained, the ship flies itself, blah, blah, but that makes the entire concept of the bridge, and even of making the captain the protagonist, superfluous. If the computer is doing everything, you don't need a single place to put all your characters were the action happens, because there's no action happening. Same with having a main character whose job is making decisions about courses of action. You may as well be doing the first season of Stargate Universe, with no bridge at all, and everyone on the ship is "payload" rather than operational crew, just working in their labs and going on away teams while the ship flies its programmed route uploaded in from Starfleet Command like a big Waymo. And, again, I get that Roddenberry's goals for TNG included taking out all the Hornblower shippy-ship stuff and making the Enterprise into a research university that only incidentally was on a cool spaceship that people flew and operated to do incredible things, to the point where he didn't think they even needed an engineer character, but that's not what people liked about Star Trek, and it all got walked back.
