One of the great things about TNG is the magic of the crew coming together to be greater than the sum of its parts. Really the TNG gang is a fairly unremarkable bunch taken individually, but they mesh somehow to become "like the heros of the ancient sagas," as Worf later says, or something to that effect.
The TNG crew is the epitome of teamwork, the "finest crew in Starfleet," whatever obvious shortcomings the individual characters may have.
I'm also a big fan of DS9, and individually those characters are more interesting, but they don't have that same magic as a crew that we saw on TNG. The TNG characters mesh particularly well.