I made a graph of when all the books I read take place versus when they were published. (Roughly; obviously some of the books cover longer time spans, so I would pick the month where it seemed the book was most centered.)
It's interesting, the early
Typhon Pact books and other ones released around the same time move everything along quite quickly; we cover about four years of story time in less than two years of publication time.
But then we hit late 2385 and everything switches. It takes over three years of publication time to get through six months of story time! Eventually things start moving forward again but never quickly.
The Hobus supernova in 2387 is like the time barrier that the Time Trapper erected to stop the Legion of Super-Heroes from following him into the future; you can go right up to it but never past it.
In terms of the practical effect of this, it's also interesting. I did often comment that there was a disjunction between what the characters had technically lived and what you
felt they lived; certainly stuff like the rapid movement through time early on contributed to that. (For example, Dina Elfiki served on the
Enterprise-E for seven years... but she still always felt like a newcomer. Or (I think) O'Brien lived on Cardassia as long as he lived on DS9!) You just felt like you were getting these occasional snapshots of, say, the
Titan crew, not the continuous story of them like you did across the series's first five or six novels.
The slow crawl was better for that kind of stuff but also had its issues, I think, though probably moreso if you were reading these books as they came out (unlike me).
