Had a lot to do with Gene's "bright and shining future" motif that guided the early seasons. Combined with the whole insistence on episodic writing and there was never a real chance for good villains to get more than the occasional two-parter.

>Q,

Q had good episodes, but like the Borg in Voyager, the writers in TNG ran Q's popularity into the ground so that the mildly malevolent omnipotent being whose visits were about teaching Picard & Co. lessons in how humanity was not ready to be visiting the stars eventually became the trickster god who showed up once a season to mess with the crew and then vanish.

>the Borg,

The Borg were interesting as villains in TNG for the reason that the Cybermen are interesting in Dr. Who: When their ships darken your sky, it's not to steal resources, claim territory, or wholesale destruction. It's to turn you into one of them, strip everything from you until you're just part of the machine that consumed you. And they do it because they think they are helping you, making you better by taking away those things that make you human.

Then they got to VOY and became villains of the week because the Paramount execs decided "Hey, First Contact did great in theaters, people really like these new Borg, so let's have them show up more and more!"

>the Ferengi
>(remember when they were going to be the biggest galactic threat since
>the Klingons?),

You mean the angry gerbils? Yeah, they tried again and again to make them sort of menacing in TNG, but by the time DS9 came around they just dropped that. After that, the only threat they posed was to the art of acting.

>that Romulan Stasi nonsense,

The writers never seemed to have an idea what to do with the Romulans. It always seemed like their reputation as masters of cloak & dagger could never be matched by what we got handed on-screen, if only because the writers could never stomach the idea of an episode where the bad guy won at the end.

>Counselor Troi's
>mother...

Majel Barrett was a wonderful actress, but I think most Trek fans would have loved to see Lwaxana Troi become the victim of a transporter accident.

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject