The best "subversion" of Voyager. More stuff like this needs to be made:
Star Trek Voyager (Subtitle: Subversion)

I 'member.

Also human descendants, dinosaur descendants, and speed force planet.

I liked that. It really summed up why voyager sucked.

I usually blame a premise that required a head writer but was instead given to a different writer for every show, just like TNG.

I can see that. But I don't know if a head writer is enough if they don't know where they are going. Ronald D. Moore, who wrote for ST and was head writer for BSG made lots of excuses for why, despite being awesome, it didn't flow. You need a head writer and at least an idea of where you are going. Filling in the details on the way is fine, but not pulling it out of your ass every episode ( or worse trying to come up with something new because everyone had already figured it out like Lost).

Right, but at least there would be character consistency. Going into the show, i was pretty sure there wouldn't be any real, tangible progress towards "getting home" until the last quarter or so of the final season.

Voyager was the first time I really got a sense of having seen all the characters before. You have the one who needs to have human emotions and experiences explained to them (Spock, Data, Odo (partly), Tuvok, Seven of Nine), the one with the bitter past and the struggle of a people on their back (Chakotay, Torres, both copied from Major Kira), the young, naive one who grows as a person during the series (Kes, Jake Sisko, Shut Up Westley), the one who doesn't work on the Bridge but people go to for advice (Neelix, Guinan, Garak), someone who's struggling to understand their new place away from their people (Worf, Odo, Seven of Nine, possibly Kes), the omnipotent god-allegory (Q, the wormhole gods, the caretaker (although he doesn't really factor to be fair)), throw in a handful of Feisty Females, make sure some people have a strong interest in identifiable 20th century tech/culture (Sisko liked baseball, Paris liked cars, I think, did Picard have something like that?) and that's most of the cast and interpersonal scripts pre-written already. It really felt like South Park's depiction of how Family Guy jokes are written. But this time the Klingon is HALF-HUMAN! As if that changes anything. Couldn't watch Start Trek after that.

Picard was into detective stories and Shakespeare

Fewer

1. For exaggerated effect.
2. Only applies if you know the number of Voyager episodes at hand without "googling"
3. Common usage.

More few than

Less more than