Just finished watching the entire seven seasons. I can still tell why I never really got into DS9 . The tone is way too dark. It’s almost claustrophobic, though I guess that is intentional in many ways. But it does seem that DS9 never really seemed to quite know what it was meant to be. It seems quite haphazard in the way it progressed the story. I guess because it is not quite star fleet managed , not quite one alliance or another.
I think the main thing that gave away the vagueness of the story line , suggesting a sort of internal struggle with how to write stories, was the development of stories away from the space station itself. Going on missions on the Defiant, with no clear command structure on DS9 itself while on these missions never seemed particularly clear. The whole religious overtone of ‘worm hole aliens’ being prophets with Bajor etc made the series drift more into high fantasy, especially towards the end.
There were a few really clever episodes though. The time travelling ones back to the 60s were quite fun with Sisko as an aspiring writer and later revisited in an insane asylum were both very engaging, especially giving the actors a chance to play different roles.
The Vic Fontaine holodeck character was also quite genius acting or choice of actor being so super smooth as to almost be in the uncanny valley but yet still was a very compelling and sympathetic character, especially during the PTSD episode of Nog.
Might check out the first few episodes of Star Trek Voyager since that seems to follow fairly directly from it.