More a product of Berman than of the '90s.
VindictiveJudge
Not technically an alternate universe. Also, the two Voyagers had only deviated from each other by a few hours. O'Brien getting killed off and replaced by his time-displaced future self is weirder, to me.
Because they're more concerned with the Federation continuing to exist as a major player in the galaxy than they are with the timeline remaining unblemished. For whatever reason, Voyager getting home early is better than the alternative.
As an adendum to that guy's post, season 5 is weaker due to production issues, but really picks up in the back half and resolves the G'Kar-Londo plot. That last bit makes it worth watching all on its own, for me.
Michael O'Hare was pretty healthy when they filmed the pilot, but got worse after, which is part of why season 1 was delayed; he took some time for treatment and JMS held off on filming until he was ready to come back. He took a turn while they were filming the season and it affected his acting. He came back for a guest appearance later on when he was feeling better and put in his best performance as the character. He retired shortly after, though.
Wait, Riker played chula?
Interestingly, someone on r/startrek actually crunched the numbers once and Dukat did reduce annual Bajoran deaths pretty significantly compared to his predecessors. On the other hand, that's like saying that you may be a Nazi, but demanding an award for not being as bad as Hitler or Goering.
"I have ranks in the medicine skill, not divine caster levels!"
Even without holodecks, should be able to get to four via the Guardian. The present versions of Will and Tom with the past versions of Will and Tom.
"I don't have a big enough helmet to approve production of moopsy plushes."
If you think about it, logically, Tom is the original Riker and Will is the duplicate. Typically, the transporter moves mass from A to B, but can replace mass that's been lost along the way as a fail-safe. The missing original mass is either left at Point A or scattered along the transport path. The most likely thing that happened is that the transporter's fail-safe systems went overboard when they failed to pick up Riker's mass - rather than aborting transport as failed, it deemed it a successful transport with 100% missing mass and replaced every atom of Riker with spares on the transporter pad. Will is a transporter clone, Tom is the original.
Hmm, I can recognize Klingon and tengwar, but not the others. I can still read Daedric from when I played Morrowind all the time, but it takes me a while to remember what the individual glyphs mean.