While I love TNG (even though the cast can’t shut up) and that was the first Star Trek I was familiar with since I was 6 and a fan of reading rainbow when it came out I would say that the original series is my favorite (can happily watch Trek through Enterprise). My dad watched Original Series reruns since as long as I can remember.
The sendoff for the original crew always gets to to me and it just contrast that with writers today who live to crap on or deconstruct the works of better writers. I saw they are making a new blade runner with a delusional man, Disney is making a new Neverending Story, and Netflix is butchering… I mean remaking the Chronicles of Narnia.
One good thing about Star Trek is that I have a lot of books to read. I was at a convention once and a guy had a bunch of Star Trek books for a quarter a piece so I left with a bunch.
My first Star Trek was actually te cartoon in the late 70's. I still remember vividly when they went into the parallel universe where space was white and stars were black. And in the very early 90's before streaming and even DVD a friend of mine bought back from the United States 4 long play VHS tapes that had managed to compress the entire first two seasons of TNG before they were released in Australia. I only had access to them for a weekend so we watched every single episode in about 70 hours with basically no sleep. So Star Terk will always hold a special place for me. But funnily enough - the only series I HAVEN'T watched is Scott Bakula Enterprise. But of late I've started to give up. I enjoyed Picard Season 2 despite its many short comings and I didn't mind Lower Decks but Discovery has just left me cold. And I can't put my finger on why - I think part of it was jumping so far into the future.
The one silver lining of getting older is you can watch stuff you've seen many years before and not remember it all. So I'll go back to Voyager, TNG and DS9 at some point but I've seen the Original at least 3 times and all the movies at least twice. As you say at least we have a massive amount of existing material so we can ignore the modern woke takes as they come out.
I swear I flipped on Disco and saw robots. One of the things about Trek is that it wasn't a robot-heavy vision of the future; Data and Lore were meant to be exceptional. They never really explained why, as far as I know; out of universe, I feel it's because Asimov had such a lock on Robot sci-fi at the time Roddenberry made Trek. That, and the budget likely wouldn't allow for that drastic of a costume/puppet.
Throwing in robots just shows that they didn't give a shit about Trek, they just wanted their own generic gay sci-fi to sully the Trek name.