Anyone who hasn't read it should read this interview with Ron Moore. It's both a rambling mess and a genuinely wonderful insight into the mind of the guy who wrote a lot of good stuff for Trek. There's a long discussion about the idea of 'truth' in a story, and how Voyager unlike DS9 fails to be 'true'.
VOY's 'Threshold' is possibly the episode most criticised for being 'not true'. It plays fast and loose with consistency and believability as it takes us to Warp 10 and gives us lil salamander babies, and what's worse is that I have no idea why it does that: the emotional core of the episode is apparently Tom Paris's ego, but that doesn't justify the preceding 40 minutes. You can't reason about it materially or metaphorically. Utterly baffling episode.
But then there's 'The Magnificent Ferengi', which isn't 'true' either. I don't believe a single moment of that episode. Quark did not survive that mission. No way. And yet, the story isn't frustrating, because it seems to understand at heart that it's (diegetically) a load of nonsense, and the writers and cast understand this too. So what's missing from this 'truth' idea? For me, being 'not true' is absolutely fine, provided every 'lie' has some purpose, even if it's just metaphorical. DS9 'lied' when it had Keevan released to Quark, but it was justified because they were doing a comedy and Keevan could be funny. Threshold 'lied' when it sent Tom Paris to Warp 10 twice and turned him into a salamander and also reverted him to normal all in the same episode, but I can't see a point to any of it, so I just come away confused.
But having justification for a 'lie' isn't enough either. Voyager can justify finding enough power to run holodecks (where all the best stories are told) on the grounds we ain't going to the holodeck (where all the best stories are told) otherwise. But going to the holodeck at all feels... wrong. My guess is that the 'truth' that really matters is the characters' truth. DS9 really did try to avoid 'lying' about its characters even as it 'lied' about their setting. Voyager meanwhile tied all its character progressions specifically to the hardship of being on Voyager, and then undermined that hardship by turning on the holodecks (where all the best stories are told) every few episodes. How can you develop a character in this environment if you give them constant relief from it? Moore's example was Torres, a character he tried and failed to figure out because previous episodes presented her character so inconsistently. Chakotay's 'blank slate' and Janeway's 'bipolar (sic)' criticisms come from this too – their characters make sense in the scope of a single story, but widen that scope and they become very confusing people.
I used to fall into the trap of saying DS9 is 'real' in the way other Treks aren't – now I'm gonna walk it back to "DS9 is the one about real people", and I'll just hope whoever I'm talking to doesn't remind me about Sisko's Space Jesus thing, or Bashir's human calculator thing, or