I don't think this is too far off the mark. Not only was it semi-serialized from the beginning with all of the Bajoran political stuff but the seasons were long -- those two factors may make it seem more difficult to get into cold. While most of the Bajoran stuff was new to DS9, I could also see how the uninitiated might think that there's necessary background material in TNG that they need to watch first.
I watched "Emissary" when it premiered in 1993, then stopped watching DS9 until after TNG ended. I started watching again beginning with "The Search, Part I", stuck with it until the end, and was eventually able to watch the first two seasons in '96-'97, after DS9 had enough episodes to be shown late every night.
At first, during the third season, I found that they were referring back to a bunch of stuff that originated in DS9, that I wasn't familiar with (and this was
still before I had the Internet), but I was able to piece together what I needed to know. Though someone else might've been like, "This is too much!" That's what I meant.
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Here's a real life example of what can go wrong when someone jumps ahead. At one point, in 1997, my uncle came into the living room while I was watching "Call to Arms" of all things! Kept asking me questions (which started pissing me off, but I kept it to myself), then I told him, "You need to have watched the last three years of DS9 in order to understand this." Then he said, "I can start watching from the original series." (I think he just wanted to watch Kirk, he used to watch TOS when he was a kid... ) I told him watching TOS wouldn't help him to understand DS9. Then my mother chimed in and said if anything would help him to understand DS9 better it would be TNG. (Reinforcing the notion of
"You have to watch TNG!" right there.)
So that was my own experience having to deal a Non-Trekkie approaching DS9. Eventually I did show my uncle all of DS9 from the beginning, and he managed to get hooked. He'd seen next-to-no TNG. (Though, after Worf showed up, I did get him to watch "Sins of the Father", "Reunion", and "Redemption").
He was a walking, talking stereotype of an angry TOS Fan who hated the very concept of TNG, so there was no way I'd have ever been able to get him to watch that. Yet somehow he didn't mind Patrick Stewart in
X-Men, but anyway... He wouldn't watch VOY either because he thought, and this is an exact quote, "The Captain has to be a man!"
Yeah. That's what I had to deal with.
