So, I took the plunge and watched the first four episodes of Season Three of Picard.
For background, I watched Season One, and I hated it. I skipped Season Two, I hated Season One so bad. I won't go into spoilers for Season Three, just in case folks here haven't seen it. All I WILL say, is that I like it better than Season One by a mile. That is likely due to...the familiar characters.
But in watching these four episodes over the weekend, I think I nailed down why I just really haven't enjoyed Trek shows since DS9 ended (and a bit of Voyager). Now, hear me out on this. What I am going to say is just my personal opinion, obviously, my take may be very different than yours, or what you watched Trek for back in the day. But it dawned on me that the major reason I haven't gotten into Trek series' is because of the de-emphasis of the utopian society. The warmth. The "we'll get there" attitude that was understatedly inserted into the original series, expertly weaved throughout TNG, and still permeated DS9 and the first couple seasons of Voyager that I watched.
It's really hard to put into words, but along with the cinematography being all dark and cold now, that hope for the future has gone dark as well. I felt Enterprise was very cold and bleak. (And kinda weird to see a ship that in some ways looked more advanced than the TNG 1701-D, given it came before it. LOL.) The feature films, starting with First Contact...same thing. And everything following.
IIRC, Roddenberry had passed before DS9, and obviously before Voyager. But his sense of a utopian future for humankind kept going for a bit. It really has, at least for me, gone missing. And that was really the underpinning of why Trek worked, at least for me. It may not be... "realistic" in the sense of what we understand to be "the real world" and how things likely would happen, but it didn't need to be. It was science fiction. The stuff now, it feels like there's an emphasis to make it feel like reality, and with that, came the darkness and cold. Less warmth. And for me, it really has impacted my enjoyment of Trek.
Just watching Picard Season Three, it really struck me that was missing (You'd figure I would have noticed by now). Anyway, the season so far is good. Not great, but good. I could live without the pointless swearing, and some of the forced jokes. But I definitely think the season is much, much better than season one so far.