The time travel element was baked into the premise, no? From that perspective, there should have been more time travel.
True, as much as you could argue that in DS9, an entire species placed outside of time was baked into the premise, allowing them to tell time-travel-kind of stories/ introduce such paradoxes without actually time traveling.
good point about Akorem. So that can be added. Even adding that, still not abused as much. DS9 found really clever ways using time, and they didn't feel overused, particularly compared to VOYAGER and ENTERPRISE.
So the underlying comment is ultimately not so much as to the amount of time travel, but more, eurm, the
originality of the stories (there may be a better word which I can't find right now). I can understand that, though it might be a bit hard to quantify.
I myself probably would look more to what the main (plot) point of an episode is. In
Accession for example, the time travel is merely an writing convenience to tell the main story, which is how a competitor for the role of Emissary confronts "the Sisko" with what he really thinks himself about his role, so in that respect, I might not count it as a "real" time travel story even though it contains time travel. Same for
Captain's Holiday for example, where the fact that the Tox Uthat comes from the future is merely an peripheral excuse for setting up a story about an extremely important item that some crooks want to get their hands on during what is supposed to be Picard's holiday. Contrasted to
Past Tense for example, where the entire point of the story is not to screw up the timeline, so I would count that one as a time travel story.
You're missing the point. The question is: How do we classify such episodes?
I think "the lives of Dax" is apt, since (in my eyes) it really is about discovering how Joran Dax "fits" into Ezri. If you need a category broader than that and not specific to Dax, perhaps you could call it a "coming to terms with one's past" type of episode, even though the "surface form" of it is a detective/thriller.