People keep saying "oh, the first two seasons of TNG were rubbish except for the odd episode" when defending STD. I don't think they give early TNG enough credit.
Season 1 has four or five flat-out bad episodes, one of which ("Code Of Honor") I could make a fair case for being one of the five worst episodes of any Trek series before Discovery. It has some that were a bit under-baked, but had enough going for them that they about worked. And there are a few that are genuinely good. Season 2 suffers a bit, with fewer utterly lousy episodes than S1 (though the clip-show season finale runs in the same circle as "Code Of Honor") but fewer truly good ones as well. But when it
was good ("A Matter Of Honor", "Peak Performance" and the Borg introduction of "Q Who?") it was very good indeed.
After that...well, not for nothing is the trope called Growing The Beard, as soon as Frakes stopped shaving the series took off. But it had shown plenty of promise in those first two seasons as well. And, much as I rag on it, Discovery has shown both promise and occasional flashes of brilliance. It's even produced one of my favourite stories in all of Trek so far with "An Obol For Charon". But good
God does it need work, and an axe taking to a good portion of the cast. Hopefully when this season is over we'll be done with Sarek and Amanda for example, as they suffer badly in comparison to their previous portrayal. !Georgiou is probably going to the Section 31 series so she'll be out of the way. Lose Tyler-Voq and L'Rell, this series has now done these NotKlingons to death.
And Burnham. Hoo boy Burnham. She badly needs her character re-tooling, and SMG going back to acting class in the break between seasons. I don't know what happened to her, the writing hasn't been all that great on the whole but she has been unremittingly rubbish since...probably the third episode this season. Though in fairness a lot of the cast were going to be shown up a bit by Anson Mount. You'd just sort-of hope that your lead actress would rise to the occasion (like Doug Jones did) rather than slide into an abyss of poor acting choices...
Detmer and Owosekun getting meaningful lines and roles in the stories has been good. The crowbarring in of backstory for Airiam was hamfisted at best but at least they tried. Tig Notaro's Reno wasn't used enough for me, but hopefully she'll survive to Season 3 (guess that'll depend on how expensive Notaro is).
Not going to say much about the latest episode yet, partly because I don't have much nice to say and don't want to provoke the STD fanboys, and partly because I plan to rewatch it together with the second half to see if that helps it.
***edit***
Almost forgot - wanted to say RIP for Vonda N. McIntyre who died recently, she was a novelist who wrote several Trek original novels and movie adaptations. She also came up with Sulu's first name Hikaru, which Star Trek VI made canon ten years after she coined it in her novel "The Entropy Effect".