I finished Places of Exile last night, and it was probably one of the best Voyager stories I've seen or read. Reading this story, all I could think was that I wished the show could have gone more in a direction like this. I think in this one story alone we probably got a lot more development for a lot of the characters than they got in the entire seven years of the show. Now don't get me wrong, I do like Voyager, but I've always felt that there was alot of stuff that the show could and should have done, and I think you did alot of the kind of stuff I wanted to see in the story. Probably one of my biggest disapointments with the show was the fact that it seemed like once they got to a certain point, it pretty much turned into the Doctor/Janeway/Seven show. But you finally corrected that mistake in this story by giving us a lot of development for everybody, and not only that, but in most of the cases you actually took them in more interesting directions than they did in the show. I also really liked the way that you developed Species 8472, you took them from being pretty much just monsters, and actually gave them and name and culture, which I really liked. But not only did you do all of that, you did all of that in the midst of a very interesting story. I the ways that all of the characters, and the Coalition developed over the course of the story. I especially like getting to see the Voth again, IMO they really are great villains and I hope that we get to see more of them in the future. I really can't think of any more specific comments about story itself, other than to say that I really liked it.
So overall I would probably give it a 9.5/10.