The doctor was not a normal hologram, he had thousands of times more processing and memory capabilities and was designed from scratch specifically to [emulate] consciousness. He's more like Data with a holographic body. The only other hologram that comes close was the Moriarty hologram that was created by the computer by accident and basically ended up taking like the entire processing capability of the enterprise IIRC. Normal holodeck characters are basically chatbots.

Yeah I think what Geordie did was way worse actually. Barclay was just using the crews faces/likenesses, but he put them in absurd situations with completely different personalities. Geordie had the computer scan all of this lady's public and private files, create as close a copy as it could based on that, and then fucked with her personality and removed her agency. He was a real fucking creep in that episode.