To add to your point about VOY I think they missed the other side of the coin too. Not just wear and tear on the ship but the upgrades. We're told many times that they added borg tech though out the ship. With a digital ship they missed a real opportunity to have it slowly change over time like a Vidiian. Yes show us the scars of battle but also show us how the ship has changed. It could have been as simple as a splash of green in the lighting. Unfortunately they always reset to zero.

I think it would have been great if they had actually committed to what is intriguing about a pre-Federation humanity; especially after the criticisms of liberal utopianism that were fleshed out in DS9. They didn't though, it mostly manifested as vague, "racism bad," stories where political tensions are a consequence of misunderstandings or external bad actors, and not the struggle to reconcile fundamentally oppositional material and political interests.

The Xindi arc was at its most interesting when the tensions within the Xindi were focused on, but that was itself shortlived and reductive. It's all just a bit flat unfortunately, even though there are a lot of really interesting ideas and a decent production behind them.

I can't say. I watched Enterprise well after it's air date and only because I try to be a completionist. I like to think it gives me some level of clarity in my critiques of the show. I'm not as biased by nostalgia for it's predecessors. Though there's a fine line between a gimmick and a show's stated premise. The show's premise was a prequel. It ventured into gimmicks when it started doing three part episodes to try to speed run the premise that it ran away from with the temporal cold war. A few novelty episodes a season isn't a bad thing but when it becomes 70% of your show I think you have a problem.