Why wasn't there an Alternate Timeline episode where Voyager became a generation ship?

I think the Dauntless was depicted as being quite a bit smaller than Voyager in Hope & Fear - I'm reasonably sure there was a lot of talk about the crew not being able to take much with them etc.

 

Because Janeway is so stubborn and adamant at getting the ship home that there is simply no alternate universe in which she accepts this possibility. There may be alternate timelines in which she dies, but never that.

 

There literally is, and I should know: https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Places_of_Exile

 

That would have been an interesting direction for the show to go in, and of course there are fanfic stories where this idea has been explored.

Janeway's an idiot for not planning for this. In the episode where Sam Wildman announces her pregnancy, there should never have been the slightest consideration that Janeway could ask or order her to terminate, and the bit of dialogue where Janeway muses to Chakotay about whether she should allow "fraternizing" is also ridiculous. Who did she expect would still be around in 75 years to reach Earth? Certainly not herself or Chakotay, as that would have put them well over 100. Even Tuvok would have been elderly by that time, so I guess it would be up to Vorik and Harry (don't recall if Naomi had been born by the time of that conversation).

Not canon, as the website says. The show itself should have had the characters preparing for the next generation, but of course Janeway didn't even think of starting any formal kind of schooling when the Borg kids came along. They were just passed around to whichever crewmember might have a free half hour here and there, and I'd bet there were a number of subjects that most Federation kids would learn that the kids on the ship didn't, either because of a lack of anyone qualified to teach them, or a lack of interest.

 

Surely Voyager has giant turbolift funhouses like Discovery that could be refitted to living quarters a bit like the inside of the Navoo/Medina

 

I think they deliberately didn't do that to enhance the unconventional nature of how love between humans and Ocampa would play itself out. If Linnis had, say, an 18 year lifespan (seems reasonable for a half-Ocampa), she'd still have been fairly young when Kes died. And Andrew, with, say, a 30 year lifespan, would be much younger as well.

With romances between species with disparate lifespans, I think you have to be forgiving. And I think that it was cool that Voyager gave us one episode where they really explored how Kes's life and descendants might have played out.

 

IIRC, Enterprise's E-Squared was originally a rejected Voyager story outline.