The whole "trying to figure things out" during the first season of TNG never should've happened. They had the entirety of TOS to look back to so they could see what worked, what didn't, and what they could improve upon. Gene Roddenberry, in theory, should've had ideas for stories he wanted to tell that had built up in the back of his mind that he never got a chance to do.
Theoretically, TNG Season 1 should've been the ultimate version of Star Trek, with all the flaws shaken off. Instead of looking at Star Trek wtihout the flaws, he looked at Humanity without the flaws, and then that led to all the writers trying to figure out, "How do we write these types of stories?" And then there was Gene Roddenberry's asshole lawyer, Leonard Maizlish (I don't care if I mispelled that). He drove away all the veteran writers, like DC Fontana and David Gerrold, who could've helped the newer writers with learning to write Star Trek.