I found every season stylistically jarring on first watch, and it made it hard to just enjoy the first time through, especially since it was the world’s first look at what new Trek was going to be like. But on second/third watch, all of the seasons except 1 are honestly pretty good. I’d take Seasons 3 or 4 of Discovery over, say, Season 1 of TNG, all of Enterprise, or season 2 of Voyager, any day. I think for me it’s a little overwhelming on first watch because it’s A - pretty high concept B - visual smorgasboard C - fast-paced. They’ll drop some important ideas or concepts really quickly then it’s back to the action. There’s no time to let ideas settle in, so you’re just suffering whiplash the whole time going from high concept to explosion to high concept to emotional moment to explosion to high concept. It’s honestly not bad, I actually enjoy media that’s too complicated to really grok the first time around, and it seems clear the fast-paced, high-concept intensity of the story is entirely part of the point, but I think this contributes to its lack of appreciation. Most people are probably gonna need to watch it a few times for the stories to really sink in.

I can throw on reruns of older Treks and kind of relax to them. I need to like, get hyped to watch Discovery.

Tons of issues, won’t deny that, but if people can look back fondly on Enterprise, I suspect they’ll be look back fondly on Discovery.