This is… troublesome and really demonstrates a massive lack of understanding of what happened behind the scenes. I think you need to watch this. It’ll lay out a lot of things that you don’t seem to be aware of. You’re giving Rick Berman a lot of credit for things he just simply never did.

He had some interesting ideas, a somewhat positive outlook on the future,

This outright false. Rick Berman said on numerous occasions that he didn’t believe that the future could be a utopia or anything like it but that when you’re making Star Trek you have to believe it. He did not have a positive outlook on the future.

I don’t think Berman had quite the “this backstory sounds absurd even for fiction” life before Trek that Roddenberry had, but they both sucked in similar ways when it came to Trek.

Berman had literally no life before Trek. The only thing he had done in TV was a childrens show. Also gonna need you to elaborate on how you think Gene sucked here because I see no similarities between that abhorrent pile of filth and Gene.

I find it somewhat interesting that many women in Trek have terrible stories about him, but Kate Mulgrew doesn’t seem to dislike him all that much.

Well, she did, but not as publicly. Why? That’s because Kate Mulgrew and Rick Berman are cut from the same cloth. Kate Mulgrew was bossing people around on the set of Voyager like she was the Queen of it. She was actively referred to as “The Queen of Voyager”. She tried to prevent Jeri Ryan from being able to use the bathroom while on set because “it takes too much time to get in and out of that catsuit.” Jeri Ryan herself commented numerous times on the active torture that she recieved on set from Mulgrew. That whole “Mulgrew liked him!” isn’t the strong take that you think it is when that woman was a fucking nightmare to her co-stars and just a fucking nightmare to people in general. Both Jeri Ryan and Garrett Wang have talked about how toxic she was to work with. Moreover, Kate Mulgrew had difficult times during negotiations herself. Rick Berman would also call to randomly say “You should eat something” because Kate was stressed on set and losing weight. So, once again, negotiations with a woman were an utter nightmare and Rick would call before scenes to taunt the actress.

Who knows what would’ve happened if someone else had taken over the show?

And that matters how? Why should we be happy with the mysognistic homophobic piece of human garbage that we got just because things might have been different?

Berman did manage to turn a heavily criticised sequel (remember, everyone hated TNG when it first came out) into what I consider to be the golden age for Trek.

No he didn’t and to say that is to absolutely ignore the work of everyone else on set and give far too much credit to a misogynistic piece of human filth.

Writers and actors have said on numerous occasions that the success of Star Trek had nothing to do with Rick Berman and was in spite of him. This was demonstrated in Enterprise as he proceeded to have way more of control over it. He was the reason for the decontamination gel, for instance, as well as outright ignoring characters of color and highly sexualizing female stars.

I have to question if any nice, likeable person would’ve been able to please the networks and their execs to make all of that possible.

You wondering about what could potentially be is not a valid reason to accept all the abhorrent things that Rick Berman did while in control of Star Trek.

Discovery and Picard were free to develop independent of him, and they felt so very different.

Yeah. That’s the point. They’re not supposed to feel the same because Star Trek is not a homogenized set of shows like everyone wants to keep pretending they are. You wanna talk about dark? Then we’re going to need to go back to Deep Space 9. A show that was notorious in having to hide stuff like the Dominion war from Rick Berman so it could be shown on screen. That’s right. One of the most beloved arcs, and critically acclaimed arcs, was actively hidden from Rick Berman so he had no involvement. Why? Because the show runner of DS9 knew that Rick Berman would meddle far too much.

They’re so depressing and dark, down to the ship designs.

That is your opinion and I really do not appreciate you trying to inject that in like it’s fact. Discovery and Picard are both dark, sure, but calling the ship design depressing is just flagrant bias which is extremely repugnant when you’re trying to use your own personal opinion to, once again, justify the actions and behavior of an aggressive homophobe and sexist.

but I would’ve taken more Berman-like work over either.

And I prefer the ideals that Gene himself instilled which were darker tones that focused on more harrowing examples of humanity. Rick Berman sanitized the show and turned it into an episodic piece of television that had to struggle behind the scenes and find its own voice despite the immense pressure from an executive who not only hated the concept of Star Trek but also had zero experience in working in this form of television and did not understand what he was doing.