I haven't really been compelled to start watching this season yet, but I will eventually. Still, it seems pretty lackluster in terms of people getting into it from what I can tell. It's a really bad sign. Final season of Discovery not being that big, Lower Decks ending, Prodigy shunted over to Netflix, Paramount+ cutting budgets and bleeding subscribers... I think we may be close to the end of another Star Trek era. I hope that isn't true, but it could be.

They really need to light a fire under the fan base. I would suggest that would involve greenlighting Legacy, but I don't have much hope for that.

I haven't been paying any attention to anyone else, but I've been enjoying this season.

It continues the abandoned Progenitor storyline from TNG. And it does a decent job at explaining why we didn't see any more about it until 800 years later.

Even the interpersonal stuff isn't terrible this season. We get to see more alternative captain/crew interaction and how those directly compare with Disco's crew.

I am a die hard fan of Discovery and am fiercely defensive of it.

But the first episode of Season 5 was so atrociously awful that it killed all my excitement for the season and I haven't had the energy or strength to start the next episode, despite the fact 4 episodes are already out.

I go out of my way to defend the show and love it. I mean my account name is taken from one of the characters of the show. All my ship models are from Discovery. My calendar is a Discovery calendar. I have a DSC Starfleet Badge. Like I FUCKING LOVE Discovery but the first episode had some of the worst writing I've seen from any Star Trek ever. I can't think of a single other episode in any of Star Trek that was as idiotic as this one was. The writers had no fucking clue what they were doing and the episode is egregiously bad. Half of the episode involves 'Rise of Skywalker' type shenanigans where the characters blindly luck into the next thing or just happen to have the thing they need because the universe is catering to them. Let me demonstrate an example from the first couple of minutes of the episode. This does spoil the first 5 minutes but doesn't spoil anything plot relevant that wasn't mentioned in trailers or whatever.

The Discovery is a rapid response vessel that can show up anywhere at a moments notice. This was what it was literally designed for. To be able to appear behind enemy lines as a surprise tactic. Burnham has to go get something from a ship and they know other people are after it. So what do they do? Jump in on top of the ship without readying up or doing fucking anything which means they're caught with their pants down. They scan the vessel and see two people onboard who then vanish so they spend 3+ minutes getting ready (their suits can literally materialize on them now) and get onboard the other vessel. They know the enemy can vanish from sensors and theorized that they can probably personally cloak. So when they land, one of the away team notes that they were here recently because water vapor is still in the air and they can follow it. So they do. They then proceed to visually clear the ship. They also never mention the water vapor again. So, fucking obviously, they are jumped by someone who is cloaked and shot at from behind.

The whole episode is littered with writing that idiotic. They will give a thing and then not pay it off or they will just use a random thing out of fucking nowhere. Like a character having information that they categorically should not have as previous seasons had made it abundantly clear that the character would not have this information. Yet they do anyway, breaking their own rules of the show. Not to mention that the writing of the episode also undoes 4 seasons worth of character development for multiple characters, sending them back to Season 1 behavior with no explanation, and frames them as genuinely bad people who are putting themselves before the mission. Like

In short, it fucking sucks so bad that it sent me into a spiral of depression because if my favorite show starts off their final season this awful how the hell is it going to possibly continue?

Lots of good points have already been made in this thread, I’ll just chime in to say I’ve really enjoyed Discovery. It definitely has its problems, and I’m kinda bipolar when it comes to Burnham, sometimes I love her, sometimes I can’t stand her…she never really learns any lessons. But the show is gorgeous and tried to do something a little different. I respect that.

The action sequences and cinematography are better and more exciting than any other Trek I can think of. That sequence in S05E01 where Burnham is blown out into space, has a suit materialize on her, jetpacks towards Discovery and then transports through the viewscreen directly into her captain’s chair was BAD ASS.

I just wish the show was released in 4K HDR. Seems like a waste of beautiful visuals.

I gave up on it halfway through season 3. I loved many of the concepts introduced in the show but ultimately found them unable to make up for the show's style. It was just exhausting to watch, and when I realized it I stopped.

The instances hosting active Star Trek communities didn’t exist during the previous season of Discovery, so Lemmy isn’t a great way to gauge relative interest.

On Reddit, the /r/startrek discussion thread for 4x02 has 1.1k comments and 4x03 has 600 comments while the thread for 5x03 only has about 400 comments. This seems to support your hypothesis.

I've been enjoying this season but I am a sucker for anything space related.