forgotten classic?

Cheers is better than Frasier for sure. Frasier had a lot more clunky episodes and the only two strong characters on Frasier were Frasier and Niles. All the characters on Cheers were well used and strong, while Roz, Daphne and Martin were weak. Eddie on the other hand had all of them beat.

The characters are not deep? They're as deep as those on most sitcoms.
No growth or development? Ditto. And sitcoms that delve into the "very special" are notoriously unfunny.
No real drama? It's a sitcom.
No storylines? "Cheers" was made when tv shows were still one-off episodes. It was actually innovative for its time by having several plot through-lines that spanned many episodes and even seasons.

But I agree that, although it is a classic, it's not the funniest show of all time. It's up close to the top, but there's really no way to determine which show is the funniest because it's subjective. There are no doubt a lot of people who would vote for "I Love Lucy", which I've never cared for, or even "Gilligan's Island", which I haven't found funny since I was twelve.

I never liked Growing Pains or Family Ties. IMO, the fun of Family Ties was basically Michael J Fox. I think he's really talented.

I tried watching Cheers recently and I agree the acting and writing are very good. I think the culture has changed and therefore the joke context have also changed. Things like Diane's faculty advisor/boss having a relationship with her, were more tolerated, even if everyone knew it was wrong. That it was wrong was not said openly, so you could have a situation where everyone in the bar sees that her fiance is going to leave, except Diane. It's not that the other people in the bar don't know he's a jerk. The joke is that Diane's the only one who doesn't see it, which also tells us something about Diane. Nowadays, a woman with Diane's personality would immediately detect that her boss was coming on to her and her reaction might be more like reporting him to the Dean or something like that. So Diane's reaction doesn't have the same comedy power as it did back then.

I still love Who's the Boss even though it's veeeeeeery dated. Tony is very old-fashioned about protecting Sam. Even in the last season, it's made clear that he and Angela are not sleeping together. Even though that probably was not realistic even back in the 80s, I like that they made it so explicitly family friendly, and I feel like it added a sort of emotional purity that's still refreshing. I compare it with The Nanny (as an example of a more recent "family friendly" show) and The Nanny seems very sexually focused to me: he's rich and cultured, she's poor and uncultured, they maintain that incompatibility throughout the show, but she keeps him interested in her using her sex appeal. I think Maxwell's character is quite shallow. It's still very funny but for me also has a bit of a bad taste? Whereas I think Tony and Angela still works as a beautiful, funny love story that also allows itself to be sad in the right places.