I find this offensive and yet I can’t find a single reason it’s not an improvement.
I only watched the first season of Picard, but everything I hear about it makes me believe I made the right decision.
If I can offer a counter argument to what others who’ve replied to you have said, in my opinion, season three of PIC is the single worst season of Star Trek to date. Nothing but empty, cynical fanservice, and the introduction of the worst sort of Scrappy-Doo character in Picard’s adult son, Jack Crusher.
People like the season because it’s getting the TNG band back together, but the season embodies all the complaints that were levelled at season one, justified or unjustified, but simply has some familiar faces. Slop in a trough.
Season 3 has a ton of problems, but it’s still a much better send off for the TNG crew than Nemesis was, and that’s good enough for me.
“Nemesis” was never meant to be a send off, though. It’s not great by any measure, but I still think it was more entertaining than season three of PIC despite all that.
Both Seasons 2 and 3 were spoiled for me and everything the spoilers described made me not want to watch the show. This is in contrast to spoilers due SNW or Lower Decks that made the shows sound far more interesting.
But I feel like the damning view is setting the TNG crew on the bridge and having it feel really off. It wasn’t even like when Scotty drank on the holodeck version of the original Enterprise. The crew looked off on the old bridge in a way that felt strange. Yeah, everyone is back, but it really feels off.
They actually hired people to come in and paint on a recreation of the specific wood grain on the arch behind the captain’s chair.
Imagine if that amount of care and effort was put into making a story suited to those characters?