Voyager has some truly great Trek. (Like, to take a example from someone who has moved up in the world since....the Bryan Fuller written episode "Living Witness")
But almost none of it requires it to be on Voyager. Swapping a lot of VOY's best for TNG's worst could be done to make one great show and one garbage bin for example.
And outside of The Doctor, everyone has drastic characterization problems to where nobody truly progresses. And ultimately part of that is the shows main problem, it never lets itself dare chase any premise out of a safe little box that resets the characters, the ship, the torpedo count, the shuttles, etc. at the end of the episode. So you mainly get a lot of disappointment that makes it seem even worse than the mostly mediocre it is.
VOY is building off TNG because DS9 couldn't do the same kind of stories, it was tied into its local part of the universe, so there is some advancement in considering premises and ENT built off VOY in a similar manner but the prequel premise added its own problems.
"Dragons Teeth" is a perfect example of all of Voyager's inherit problems within a good Trek episode. Nothing requires it to be the Voyager crew, TNG could do this episode with a few parts changed around. But the central premise, the discovery of a landmark technology from a "lost race" whose society and civilization were ruined by hostile powers who have already butted heads against the crew provides the opening hand, then you get the turn, that the "lost race" was defeated because of their past actions and now they plan to seize Voyager (or the Enterprise) to begin the rebuilding of their empire, and finally the river, where the ships escape and Seven/Janeway acknowledge they most likely reignited a major interstellar war after hundreds of years of peace.
But Voyager as a show can't follow up on this, it has to continue its relentless travel towards the Alpha Quadrant. And unlike ENT, or "Year of Hell" or even the Equinox, we're never allowed a ship that's truly hurting, low on resources, etc.
They screwed up with the Kazon because there was no reason for a race that scavenges for parts to be such a long term antagonist across so much space, especially a particular tribe of this race and your former crewmember (who had a baby!) and then overcompensated by going in the other direction with everyone but The Borg. The one time it somewhat worked was when they had the Hirogen for only a period of a season as semi-recurring in small groups or solo, and they had to ruin that by capping it with not only a two-part Holodeck episode centered around World War II starring a whole host of Hirogen, but then suddenly three years later run into one of these same faction of the Hirogen's outposts. (I'd also like to point out that in that Holodeck episode, at the end of the first part (or at the middle if it's viewed in the two hour format, I dunno what's on the DVDs/streaming, it originally aired as two hour format then reruns were split), they use actual explosives to blow a hole through multiple decks of the ship. Nobody seems much to care. The very next episode starts with Tom Paris in the holodeck pretending to be a 1950's car mechanic.)
The Delta Flyer alone makes a mockery of the show's potential as showing a true journey into the unknown, but then there's the fact that they REBUILD IT COMPLETELY after losing the first one.
And everything about the Maquis crew immediately mocks the shows premise of having to integrate them.
I won't take credit for the idea as a whole, but I did start in the little GAF TrekTalk orbit the joke about the show actually being about a villain and Janeway is that villain character. I've since seen articles and stuff expounding on that reconsideration of Voyager from that perspective and how it makes it a totally different show. I was mainly working off Janeway's constant double standard with Federation Rules that always fit whatever she wanted including more than once basically suggesting genocide*, along with the fact she kept Harry Kim an Ensign for the entire run while promoting other characters.
This joke is only really seriously added onto when you consider how her actions in the Finale are arguably one of the most questionable or vile acts ever shown by a Starfleet Captain, let alone main character of a series, on screen, especially when compared to the poignancy of the Kim/Chakotay/Doctor episode where Voyager is frozen in ice that explores a similar theme. Janeway's motivation is sacrificing untold trillions or more so that Tuvok can get home quicker for an eventual treatment for a future illness. During which she breaks every rule in the book, informs people in the past of their future, TAKES WITH HER ADVANCED WEAPONRY, alters decades of history at that point, all to speed this up, something she had just a year prior in our time chewed out and destroyed the Equinox for daring to do on her watch. Oh, plus the other half of her motivation is just to stick her dick in the eye of the Borg Queen (no Cream avatar) and probably plunge the Delta Quadrant into horrific warfare for centuries*.
*To be fair, significant levels of the Federation leadership (along with the Cardassian and Romulan leaderships earlier) were also willing to commit genocide of The Founders and plunge the Gamma Quadrant into chaos to win/prevent the Dominion War. So Janeway was seemingly cut out to be more of a high ranking insane Starfleet Admiral of the Week than a series helming Captain anyway.
