I think DS9 set a precedent that was bad for the franchise, but I don’t hate it; the show felt like it understood its roots. I took DS9 as a way to explore how federation values addressed a galaxy not quite there yet.

It didn’t diminish the hopeful future by saying that “actually the federation is evil" it just said “listen, we still have work to do”.

Watching Cisco wrestle internally with reconciling who he knew he was supposed to be while the galaxy tested that was at least interesting on an intellectual level.

I think that bit of nuance got lost though, so I do kinda wish it had never happened.