I will reiterate that Scorpion received some of the best reviews and ratings in the show's run.
When the audience thought it was going to be a 100 part story. Once they realized it was a 2-parter they stopped liking it.
VOY didn't attempt the lost ship scenario, except in lip service and the rare episodes, so I do not know what would have been if they had done so.
It still would've gotten critiqued even if they had maintained it and sensibly dropped it after it ran its course. No matter what the show would get complaints.
If they stayed in conflict for the entire 7 seasons, they'd have to be insane. And the innate sexism of the premise would've drawn more complaints.
The audience wasn't ready to dislike Farscape from Day One, and keep complaining it should've stayed on. The opposite of Voyager.
Farscape had more to work with than Voyager did. And if Voyager had done similar stuff as Farscape, the audience would just complain they were ripping off past Trek (D'Argo = Worf, Zhann = A Bajoran type, Peacekeepers = Cardassians/Jem'Hadar, etc).
The premise wasn't that unique, and the audience complained anytime they tried to flesh out their surroundings. How the heck do you make new aliens if the audience complains if they showed up more than ONCE?
DS9 did this too. The Station was always at full capacity despite there being a full scale war going on. There was never any battle damage, the Defiant always looked fresh out of the factory, they never ran low on supplies, etc.
So why no complaints there?
My second biggest gripe was the initial racism toward the EMH. Man, he's your ONLY medical professional. Would it kill you to treat him with a little more respect? Good God.
No one cared when TOS did this with Spock.
Battlestar Galactica (re-imagined, which was kind of Voyager re-imagined, too) did a good job in that regard. Not to say that that show was perfect, or anything, but they got the whole "dwindling supplies and decaying ship for lack of replacements" thing down perfectly, imo
NuBSG fell apart after only 2 seasons. That's all the "Lost Ship" plot is good for. And they wussed out plenty of times and also used the reset button (no matter what, Roslin always ended up back in charge and Adama was always fleet Commander, they never really ran out of anything, etc).
Well, we will have to agree to disagree about Scorpion. Because evidence points a different direction.
Part of me is confused by the notion that the audience was annoyed at Scorpion for not lasting longer, yet would also be annoyed for aliens repeating episode to episode. Certainly, it is difficult to please all audience members, but that doesn't mean that
everyone hated it. Perhaps they wanted Scorpion to continue because that was the kind of show that was expected.
VOY would have been critiqued-fact of life, all shows deal with it. Some are nitpicks, as several other posters have recently demonstrated, but some are problems inherent to what was produced on screen. VOY had a proposed plot, but lack any follow through on that. Again, regardless of the viability of the "Lost Ship" plot, it still wasn't attempted. At least attempt it, please
VOY's circumstances were not unique in that Trek had never done it before. It was unique because it was 1) a new place that has never been seen before 2) a different mix of crew, were you could have
some conflict, as the two crews grow together and intermix. I doubt anyone is asking for seven years of conflict-that is a bit of a stretch to have that expectation. We're talking about Maquis and Starfleet not Capulet and Montague here.
Also, VOY had a tendency to do things that were flagrant rip offs of Trek tropes. The Kazons turned in to discount Klingons, without the benefit of cloaking devices or melee weapons. There was the requisite "anomaly of the week" a TNG staple that did little to add to VOY's characters, as well as a holodeck malfunction plot multiple times. We have the character split/fusion routine, like "The Enemy Within" and Tuvix. No doubt you can find connections all over the place, but it might sound like nitpicking.
The problem isn't that VOY did things that other Trek shows did or had done. The problem comes back to the execution, the implications, whether it matters to the characters, and the originality of the presentation. Yes, it has all been done before, but you can add your own unique spin, unique flavor without it being identical. VOY had its limits, but never challenged them. It was content inside its box.
Farscape, since it keeps coming up, built itself up through characters. The first season, right until Nerve, was a bit of a hodgepodge mix of good and bad. It wasn't always the best of stories, and some aliens or situations never get visited again. But, the characters were changing and becoming a single crew, despite mistrust and misgivings. By the end, the conflict was replaced with a loyalty and mutual respect.
That's the difference. VOY had more to work with because the audience knew Starfleet, knew the ideals and the concept, and not we can put them in different situations and test those ideals. Say what you want about DS9 or even Abrams Trek, but they took the idealized Federation and put it to the test.
Again, I don't hate VOY. There are many things I can list that I like, such as Tuvok, Paris, or the Delta Flyer. However, there are very few episodes that I like, unlike, say TOS or TNG or even DS9 (which has grown on me in recent years). It just feels like just had the formula and stuck with it, no matter what. So, it was a bit frustrating to have a surface level formula, rather than some of the deeper, more memorable themes that ran with DS9 and even the TOS movies.
As a quick aside, DS9's pylon being repaired: isn't this the series that talked about industrial level replicators, used for infrastructure rebuilding? A pylon strikes me as not a big deal. Bajor even had one of these replicators.