I've often expressed similar views.
From 1986 to 1994, the Trek movies and Trek TV shows had different production teams. One was really good at making TV. The other had honed creating Star Trek movies into an art form. Each had specialized skills for their particular production branch, basically.
1994 saw the amalgamation happen where the TV guys were handed the keys to the entire franchise, including making the movies, and even the much vaunted First Contact still feels like something you might be able to get on TV, just with more money thrown at it. I truly believe that Berman/Piller/Moore/Braga/Carson/Frakes were excellent at producing mass market television with the sausage factory penny pinching production line approach TV needed, but when brought over to making feature films, their instincts for making great TV hindered them. They couldn't ever quite concieve 'big picture' ideas, coming at them from a small picture perspective.
One great example: the TOS movies, unlike the episodic show, explored ongoing narratives and sequel escalation to create an epic feel you couldn't find on TV. But the TNG movies are almost uniformingly episodic and individual by nature.
Just my POV of course
I think I share it. There is "something" about every TNG film that anchors it to the TV series in a disappointing or uncomplimentary fashion compared to what you've come to expect from movies
I-VI. Whether it's the music of
Generations, the medium-shot cinematography of
First Contact, the TV-quality post-production work on
Insurrection or just the general feeling about
Nemesis that its scope exceeds its production value (stellar cartography, Romulan Senate, etc). And nothing ever came along and kicked the TNG films (or the Kelvin movies, unfortunately) into a higher concept long-term game than just planning each production one film at a time. I "suppose" it took Nimoy threatening to not do ST again to accomplish that.
But the frustrating thing is, Harve Bennett and his team were mostly themselves TV people, and their money was still being closely monitored by Paramount's TV department. So it's harder to understand what held Berman's team back aside from just being used to filming ST as a TV series.
The Voyage Home really is my favorite ST these past couple of years, and two of the most striking images in that film are the ones that seem to get ridiculed the most. The first is the Whale Probe itself, which too often gets compared to a cigar or a tootsie roll, as if implying the visual effects are somehow chintzy or cheap. And that has just never been my experience at all; in fact its imposing presence over Earth creates for the kind of abstract visualization that I love about
The Motion Picture, the 2009 film, and even (in small part) certain aspects of the Kelvin sequels, such as the Vengeance's hiding near Jupiter, or the nebula and initial bee-swarm attack in
Beyond. My other favorite TVH image is the time-travel sequence, which it seems to me people in the aftermath of the Berman era just wonder why that's even there. As if viewers maybe just prefer a simpler TV world in which everything makes sense, and would rather the Whale Probe aliens actually come out and show themselves to be dolphin-foreheaded humanoids courtesy of Michael Westmore's TNG make-up department.
But even just a simple shot of Kirk and Spock (in headband) walking side-by-side near Fisherman's Wharf somehow looks bigger on a projected screen than almost anything to come out of the later TNG films. Although breaking the movie theaters up into cineplexes might also be part of the problem.
Reading old Best of Trek collections and other fanzine lettercolumns from the time, there were some fans thinking/hoping the new series would literally be another season of TOS, picking up where STIV left off.
I love those older books; wish I had held onto the few that I had.
Some things never change though. In some of those essays, it's apparent fans back then had as much problem with the individual style of each new Kirk/Spock movie as people now have with accepting new retroactive designs for the klingons and general production design under both Kelvin Trek and CBS.
) hypothesis 
