My Main Criticism of TNG is......

Keep watching until the end of season 3

As it was a syndicated show a requirement was that a network could air an episode whenever they wanted.

Good point. More depth to some of these stories might have been just what the series needed. The weekly adventure thing got a little old after a while. All they did was just explore, explore, explore and never really progressed to any purpose. It's intriguing to have a quest or mystery unfold over a whole series. But it is a tricky business. Lost had that going for a long time but in the end it didn't really pay off. The X-files had it too but in a more hybrid fashion, so even though the unfolding mystery kind of petered out near the end we still had great stand-alone episodes all along. Then there is the problem of having to watch in sequence, which is hard enough to do now but was much harder to do before the days of DVRs/streaming/on-demand etc.

There was a bit of it - a few two part episodes, the recurring involvement of Q, the Borg, Data's quest to be more human culminating in the emotion chip, and maybe a few more if I thought longer. You are just on season 3 so you might feel a little differently after watching the entire series but on the whole I think the lack of this was a significant limitation on the masterful storytelling ability the creators clearly possessed.

OTOH we did have the feature-length motion pictures and although I enjoyed them I felt TNG was stretched a bit thin to fill it all up. So maybe 'superficial' was the best you could do with it?

Well, what you're experiencing with this show is indicative of the problems mainly coming from Gene himself, at the same time applied to the nature of Star Trek in general. TOS was meant to be like Wagon Train to the Stars, in which each episode was meant to be self-contained, that if you were a new viewer you didn't need to watch the very first episode to get acquainted with everything and understand what's going on, utilizing both dialogue and the visual language of cinema to communicate with the audience.

TNG was meant to be applied in the same way, but things were very different for Star Trek as a franchise. Trek had become a cult following and that had spawned four feature films by this point, and finally Paramount decided to go with a new TV series, and Gene Roddenberry was not going to let that go by without his control. He had been, by and large, out of the halls of power in Hollywood for some time, and he was desperate to get back into the swing of things, and to present his vision of Star Trek this time with as little input from the studio execs as possible.

But he was in failing health, heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol on a daily basis, and it showed in his writing and conceptualizing. Normally, most TV shows and movies have more than a sentence or two describing who and what the characters are, but with the TNG crew, most of it was either just a few words or even just one word. Data: Android, emotionless, Pinnochio. Or, Worf: Klingon. You can imagine how tough it can be for writers to write for such characters if even the creator doesn't know what kind of people they are.

Further, Gene was under the rubric that after 80 years since Kirk and Spock, mankind would evolve beyond fundamental disagreements the way those characters had. So he banned all internal conflict from the main cast; meaning that you weren't going to have characters come to loggerheads the way Bones and Spock routinely did in TOS. This severely hampers writers' abilities to create compelling drama, making it all come from outside the cast rather than anything from within.

If it weren't for TOS' success prior, if it hadn't ever existed, TNG would never have made it past its pilot. It took three seasons for the show to really find its footing, and by then Gene had gone, and died shortly after he left, and they went through a couple of other executive producers before settling on Michael Piller and Rick Berman, who were able to take the show in a direction, and even sneak in some internal conflict here and there.

My biggest gripe about the show is that it accidentally stumbled on what would've been the greatest sci-fi story arc ever in television, and they didn't see it. Maybe they were too busy, given the pressure to put on 26 episodes a season. But what they showed was a Federation that had gotten so comfortable that Starfleet no longer considered itself a military, and started building their ships for luxury and comfort for long voyages rather than for potential warfare. This is a sign of civilizational decay, one of the chief reasons why civilizations fall; sometimes, people get so comfortable that they no longer feel a duty to their nation and its protection that they cede such duties over to the state, so that they can live lives of abject pleasure without worrying about whatever may lurk out in the frontiers.

But they don't see that, and in spite of catastrophe after disaster after huge catastrophe, nothing much ever changes, if anything at all. What they should've done is have the characters examine their own beliefs about their culture to see if they're seeing reality as it is, not as they'd like it to be. After the Yamato Disaster in Contagion, they should've been asking whether or not it's a good idea to have families residing on ship's meant to go into harm's way. After the Borg, they should've really considered maybe that Starfleet's belief that it's not a military might be hampering their ability to adequately defend the Federation. This would be a huge source of internal conflict and drama setting the tone throughout the series that, if done right, could've catapulted TNG into legendary heights. But, alas, we didn't get that story.

I like episodic TV...if you don't like a particular story then there will be a new one next week. But TNG does callback to previous episodes at times. This is perfect for episodic TV. Arcs can get annoying. I used to like 24 but it quickly became tedious. Some shows like BURN NOTICE were good at being episodic with just a little bit of story arc to keep you watching without aggravating the viewer. Plus serialized shows usually don't have a rewatchability factor.

A series like this imo should always follow in the footsteps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The best seasons always have a good sprinkling of stand alones and serials, multiple part episodes and season long aspects that make a season finale actually satisfying.

Without some kind of serialization, a drama series starts to feel pointless, because whatever character development there is is never brought up again.

Apathy on the rise, no one cares

I read somewhere that TV series having one long over arcing story line is due at least in part to the rise in popularity of binge watching - people who sit down on a weekend and catch up on the 5 episodes of their favourite program they have sitting unwatched on their PVR. It's also why services like Netflix will produce and release most of or an entire season of a show at once made with one long story arc. It seems when it's one story over many episodes, the show tends to be more popular and makes for easier binge watching.

Not to imply that the continuous story line is new. The X-Files had both what I think the producers called "Myth building" episodes (that related to a continuous story line) and stand alone episodes. And as far as Star Trek goes, DS9 in its later seasons adopted more of a continuous story line structure with the Dominion War episodes.

I have a brain and good taste, so no, I'm not part of the target demographic.

Well my criticism was the techno-babble. "If we can switch the conduits to the main circuit fryer and establish a link between the neuro-networks, we can survive!" but I guess if someone from the future came to the present to explain technology or technicalities about using a machine, it'd sound just as ridiculous. Also the deus-ex-machina ending. Sometimes the episode just rigs it against the Enterprise's favor yet the Enterprise makes it out due to one minor floonky dink