I can clarify some of the Voyager hate, at least from the time. Part of it was absolutely the fact that women had such prominent roles in the show. The chuds have been around since the beginning of making and will probably be there at the end (in fact, they’ll probably be the cause of the end) and they hate anything that says other people are, well, individuals just like them.

But my gripes with Voyager are as a TNG fanatic who was amused by DS9 but hoping they go back to Roddenberry’s Star Trek. Roddenberry used to impose weirdly strict rules to how problems in the future would be tackled, such as having a mom die and show how their child would grieve and grow in a utopia. By DS9 authoritarian ideals took hold and the plots became about intrigue instead of solving humanistic problems.

By the time Voyager came out the sentiment that Trek was in freefall began. Paramount wanted to be Star Wars so now Star Fleet has rebels and warships that fight some underrepresented war all along the frontier with various one shot aliens who lack discernable variation. Trek quality had fallen from the imminently quotable TNG (darmak and jillad! Four lights!) to DS9 having good stories but lacking most quotability like TNG to Voyager having a good idea but lacking any Star Trek structure. It became Star Trek Fury Road as pivotal villains like the Borg are reduced to side characters and episodic hindrances. The fucking Borg took Picard. Wolf359 shattered Star Fleet. Then Voyager comes along and undermines all that by giving Voyager subspace tech that rivals The Travellers and solving the entire show with the ship equivalent of a weak fist fight. When once a cube was enough to guarantee a 2 part episode now it’s a mystery if a Voyager cube will make it to the end of the episode.

Voyager gets grief because it weakened the threats in the galaxy and made weak ass villains to replace them (fuck the undine) instead of building in any existing threat.

However, with the hindsight of 20 years it’s become evident that Voyager was the weightless fun before the freefall. Enterprise and Picard did a lot to sour the hope of many long time fans. The action in an episode is now the focal point instead of the culmination of a mystery that the crew has been trying to unravel. There is a rush to make a blend of Trek and Star Wars for a while now as media executives forget what makes their settings unique. Voyager was the first step in that direction.