I have the old TV Guides (The ones that featured Star Trek on it's covers). In the NYC Metro area, It was on Sunday nights 7PM on WPIX. TNG was on Saturday nights at 7PM on WPIX.
We can't. However, we can see their skills clearly deteriorating over the past 10+ years, starting from pretty decent TNG stories to Voyager, and while Enterprise was a boost as they apparently recognized their faults and wrote around them, it's never managed to be consistently good.
Berman & Braga are a known quantity, sure. But they're a low known quantity, and if Paramount wants to play it conservative and go with known skill levels, I'm sure Robert Wolfe could use the work. Or they could hire writers with a good track record. It may wind up worse than B&B, but keeping them means resigning yourself to the slow death they're causing the franchise.
It will be better because it'll be new blood, which is precisely what the creative side of the show needs. Everything else (cast, production design etc) are pretty decent. Trek is simply suffering from being too "samey" and too "safe" all the time. That has changed to some extent this season - but I'm sure it could change more if they brought back ISB or, say, the Farscape team to run things.