UWC Defiance said:
The storytelling didn't get worse on every Trek series, every week, starting with DS9. Nor was the storytelling of TNG consistently superior to that of DS9 or Voyager or Enterprise.
If anything, a lot of people seemed to prefer the Behr/Coto eras of DS9 and "Enterprise" to the Piller/Braga beginning years of those shows.
What did go down steadily for ten years, regardless of show content, was the viewership.
People got bored.
TNG at its most successful didn't represent the best storytelling on the tube. It was, however, still reasonably novel in the experience of most of the folks watching it.
All of modern Trek sounds and looks and plays ridiculously alike; the whole "franchise" has not evolved nearly enough to compete with all the kinds of entertainment that people can choose to watch instead.
Trek died because people got bored with seeing the same kind of thing week after week for thousands of hours.
Insistence that everything be consistent with what had come before was and is a huge part of that sameness.
Quite the opposite of trek fans' insistence that the Trek milieu represents a "universe" of vast possibilities, in fact it's rather a narrow crevice that's been long since mined out and which makes good storytelling far more difficult than is worth the effort. Despite the fact that a couple of million devotees remain committed to sightseeing in that ditch, it has to change or the thing's not worth reanimating.
I... agree.
Indeed, this is why I've said that it would ultimately have been best for Trek if it had died in 1982 with Spock and both had stayed dead. As much as I enjoy DS9, it is hardly a high water mark in terms of tv drama (TOS, for its time and context, by contrast, was). It would have been far better for SF and tv both had Trek spawned countless successful SF shows, each representing a new view and a new universe, rather than countless reiterations of the same increasingly tired milieu. Instead, we get the undignified sight of people trying to bring 1967's view of a world two hundred years hence (I maintain that TOS, by its own reckining, probably takes place in the early 23rd century rather than the late--that is, when it doesn't take place in the 28th century) in line with 2007's view of that world. New wine needs new skins, baby.
But I'll see Trek XI if it looks halfway decent because I'm a hopeless addict whose been jonesing for the shit since I was nine years old.
, if you get me. 
