I understand that but they were in the delta quadrant and Janeway made many deviations from a direct course home that’s all seven was saying, I’m sure starfeet would understand sacrificing exploration And just getting the crew home.
Ah, but that was my very point: exploration is the only way to get home. Without exploration, they just end up dying of old age in empty space.
Sure, but
we see it too, and
in this scene with Janeway, Chakotay also confirms he 'saw the tractor beam' in the sensor material Seven showed him.
Well, Chakotay would join the ranks of those wanting to believe. For a brief while anyway. Without all the preceding argumentation by Seven, he might have seen nothing but a nondescript smudge there.
Although I rather think there was nothing but an even
more nondescript smudge there originally, and Seven then applied a dozen types of "filter" and "enhancement" when trying to better see the thing she solidly believed was there. So the smudge we see is the product of those filters and enhancers, and not real - yet Seven is not actively trying to deceive, and herself believes in the image that emerged solely because she wished really hard for it to emerge.
The image material is still there to be analysed. It would certainly have been interesting enough for the Voyager crew to try find out what it actually was, even after Seven's 'episode' was over.
Which is what I think they did, and they just found out that the raw image material contained nothing but the original nondescript smudge. Embarrassing Seven with it would have been cruel; boring the audience with it would have been superfluous.
And, we also never got an explanation why Voyager
did carry those tricobalt devices (which Tuvok confirmed was non-standard

) .
...My pet theory is that Starfleet couldn't afford to give Janeway a full complement of photon torpedoes for this milk run of a mission, so they slipped in some of these inferior tri-cobalts which are only good for demolishing of static, unshielded targets, and were having their best before date rapidly approaching anyway.
Timo Saloniemi