Okay, so. The Delta Quadrant is simply a quartered section of the Milky Way galaxy, yeah? Voyager finds itself there and has to travel for 75 years to get home, yeah? Assuming the ST maps out there are accurate, all of the quadrants are basically the same size. So this suggests that travel in either the Beta or Alpha Quadrants could involve super lengthy timelines like this.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is why VOY makes such a big deal out of the 75 years to get to the Alpha Quadrant when getting there might also involve another several decades of travel after crossing the "border." Sure, there are allies and all that. But it's still deep space. Like, the closest point between the quadrants is going to be near the galactic center/core (or are they accounting for the spin of the Milky Way and are thus traveling against that, so as to bring "home" closer while they themselves travel toward it?). So if it takes 75 years from their location in "Caretaker" to get to the core, then they're looking at a similar amount of travel to Earth or whatever, right? Or did I miss something where they said that it would take 75 years to get to Earth?