BSG works because they had fighters for the fast velocity battles and the like. Take them out and the ship to ship battles are crap.
I guess that's a matter of taste, but I probably liked watching the Galactica and the basestars more than the Vipers and raiders. The Pegasus ramming a basestar is the second coolest FX I ever saw in BSG (the Galactica jumping during planetfall is the first).
Besides, as far as we know the Romulan War had battles like Salamis, with a thousand ships on either side, as a matter of course. Lots of nukes going off every which way. I think that would be visually interesting.
WWII, people keep bringing that up but it's a false argument. Because WWII is a real event that happened in the real world whereas with Trek it's just fiction. No point in trying to get people as invested in that as they would the real world.
I think it's analogous. Saving Private Ryan is a fiction, with no bearing on the real world war--but it was interesting (yes, even beyond the pseudo-documentary first forty-five minutes
), not because we want to know whether Hitler is stopped, but because we want to know what happens to the fictional characters in the film. (Das Boot can be substituted for SPR for film snobs.
)
Just because we know the Allies beat the Romulans, we don't know if the characters we (theoretically, of course) care about survive. Archer's fate isn't written in stone. (Or was it? I can't remember. Well, either way, it didn't
have to have been.)
Like I said, they told us TOO MUCH about the past of Trek for there to ever be good storytelling there.
I still insist we know very little about the Romulan War. It was discussed in any detail at all in only a single episode, where we learned shockingly little:
1)Atomic armaments were the mainstay of both forces.
2)We never saw the Romulans' faces, recovered a body, etc.
3)Some racist jerk navigator had some family members who died in it.
Plus, if there HAD been a crew who went around doing important stuff like Archer's crew were doing they'd have been mentioned in TOS+. No one famous from the Rom War era was EVER mentioned meaning their very existence would be considered an irredeemable canon violation by the Canon-nutters. And conversely, no one would want to watch a show about a nobody crew who never ever accomplished anything even though canon says that's all the ENT crew could've been.
Canon never dictated that no one ever did anything cool in the 2150s (until Enterprise aired, that is
). Canon doesn't even dictate that the crew of the U.S.S. Constitution wasn't doing stuff just as awesome as the crew of the Enterprise. The only U.S. presidents ever mentioned are FDR and Lincoln (and maybe Kennedy?), but that doesn't mean that others didn't exist who were practically as important. The fall of the USSR is never referenced, and some evidence even suggests that it never happened (Chekov is from Leningrad, Leningrad is namechecked in TVH), but we can't assume that it didn't. The absence of evidence for cool stuff happening does not mean cool stuff never happened.
Sure, it strains credibility that the Xindi engaged in a genocidal effort against humanity and then disappeared, never to be spoken of again. It doesn't strain credibility nearly as much for, say, the
Klingons to have threatened Earth, or to have Archer head up a task force that faced a Romulan fleet that bombarded Andor. There would be less canon violation!!1 in a whole season where they let their imaginations run wild with the Romulan War, short of completely glassing a Federation planet known to be habitable in the 2260s, than in the single episode they decided to bring the Ferengi into.
Or, hell, in the mere name of the show. I don't think I'd have called the NX-01
Enterprise. Maybe
Challenger.
Because that is utterly and completely predictable and can never be avoided under any conceivable circumstances. 
