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3) I also didn't care for the castrating of the borg, granted this started in First Contact.
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Heck, it started with "The Best Of Both Worlds"
I think the biggest fault I found with "Voyager" was
squandered potential.
Go back and watch "Caretaker", and some of the other early episodes. As dumb as the plot of "Caretaker" was - and the "our planet's running out of water" chestnut is as dumb as they come - there was some nifty stuff set up. But by the end of the episode, all the Maquis characters were in Starfleet uniforms, and the potential tension there never really surfaced. Kes and the Ocampa were one of the more creative alien species Trek ever came up with. There was early chemistry between B'elanna and Harry that was never followed up on (far more than Torres and Paris ever showed).
In the hands of ambitious writers, the Delta Quadrant setting would offer them great chances at world-building, like Robert Wolfe managed with "Andromeda" and... Well, I'll save that point for later. But the writers weren't ambitious; they seemed determined to do "just more Trek". We never saw things get tense between Federation and Maquis; Kes got empathic powers but we seldom saw much sign of how such a short lifespan would give her different perspectives from humans. We saw a lot of episodes that could have easily been on TNG, and we seldom saw the story build. There was never any real sense that "Voyager" was depleting resources or recovering from its regular batterings; it was just used as an occasional random plot device for a story.
1999 was the year I totally gave up. During February sweeps, "Voyager" had a two-parter that they ran as a movie, "Dark Frontier". Yeah, it was part of the steady deterioration of the Borg as villains, but it was well-made, gave us Seven's backstory, and built to a great climax. And at that climax, Seven decides where her loyalties lie, yelling "I am Annika Hansen" and freeing Janeway.
Bam. Absolutely "Voyager"'s finest moment; dramatic as it comes, and it looked for all the world like a turning point for one of the show's main characters.
Only it wasn't. The next week, "Annika" was just "Seven Of Nine" again, like the big emotional payoff had never happened. Well, screw that. If the producers are going to be so cavalier, why should I invest any emotion in this show?
And then, a month later, "Farscape" premiered and it was everything "Voyager" should have been but wasn't. The premise is remarkably similar - a ship in the middle of uncharted territories, far from the homes of its crew (with their differing agendas), hunted by the local authorities, looking for a way home. Relationships (and tensions) between the characters grew in logical ways. The story built in exciting ways - it seemed like three times as much happened in the average "Farscape" episode than in an hour of "Voyager" - creating the world that "Voyager" didn't. And the eye candy - wow. You believed you were in an alien environment, with something new and exciting (and scary) around each corner.
"Farscape" had creativity coming out the wazoo, and was so much better than "Voyager" with basically the same premise that, well, how do you justify watching "Voyager", when it was so obviously just going through the motions? After seeing what "Farscape" was doing with the itinerant-spaceship idea, "Voyager" seemed even more flat and uninspired.