I pretty much had the exact same experience with Voyager.
Hated Janeway and Nelix, found them more appealing in the complete second viewing.
Rated Voyager way below TNG, now I could make a case for Voyager being the better series. OTOH, while you said Voyager was more consistent, TNG had way more classic episodes( maybe twice as many at least)
One thing I found interesting was how the Voyager folks updated a good TNG episode. One example was where aliens from another dimension were experimenting with crew members while they were asleep. (Schisms). Voyager took similar idea with the episode (Scientific Method) but told a far more compelling (and actually gruesome) story.
Another example is time travel. Both series loved to play with time but probably one of my favs from both series was when they played with time compression. In the TNG episode Inner Light, Picard was placed in a small village, where it appeared there was a problem with the sun and the planet was dying. The village folk convinced him his Star ship days were a dream and Picard lived out the balance of his life in that village. Of course Picard wakes up and finds he was out for about 10 minutes. OTOH, the knowledge of the flute he learned to play in the dream, stuck with him and the episode ends with him playing a tune.
Voyager otoh, took a different track with an encounter of a race that lived in a type of time bubble (Blink of time) where 3 years for this culture equaled only 2 minutes on Voyager. What was great about this episode was that it was told almost entirely from the alien cultures point of view. I kinda choked up in the end when the young alien astronaut who saves Voyager, looks on as a very old man when the light that was voyager finally leaves their skies. What was minutes on Voyager was decades on the planet below.
Both shows had plenty of thought provoking episodes. The one from both series that still sticks with me today the episode on TNG called Darmok. Where the Enterpise encountered a race that spoke only in metaphor. There was a huge communication barrier that never really got resolved even in the end. Just about always in sci fi we always understand the alien culture's language. I love that this was explored (note: I also loved the movie Arrival)
The most thought provoking episode for Voyager (Distant Origin)was the one where they discovered that the dinosaurs from our planet did not go extinct, they left in ships after the meteor hit. So of course they have had millions of years to develop a new culture, that for all practical purposes forgot that they had come from earth. And what would be left of a society on earth that existed 50 plus million years ago?
As far as the least season, a ton of good episodes but no classics, although Shattered comes close (Voyager is broken up into a number of time bubbles).
Currently, I got caught up with Orville. Some of their special effects are stunning (like the one where the sun was pulling apart a planet). But their story telling is still not quite right. Its getting better. But still, one episode showed them looking at the shuttle, getting into the shuttle, driving the shuttle interior view, shuttle leaving cargo bay exterior view, shuttle outside the ship and departing. About a min of obvious visuals that could have went to better story telling.
