Meant to build up some replies to things here.
TOS vs TNG? Pre-Locutus Picard < Kirk < post-Locutus Picard, personally. Other captains similarly vary, if that's the best way of comparing other series pairings. (It isn't, but it's close.)
I also think Archer could have gotten far better. (Although I kept on expecting him to go "Oh boy!", after each use of the fledgling Transporter...)
How about...Favorite Star Trek ship. Any species. Go.
Enterprise-E (I think) 'future' ship from All Good Things. That or the NX01. (I just like deliberately 'speculative' fast-forward/rewind designs. In all kinds of fictional canons.) The Defiant is in a class of its own, of course.
Beardless Riker was meant to be Kirk and frankly, it kinda shows that Kirk REALLY doesn't work as a side character.
My first impressions after seeing Encounter At Farpoint the very first time was along the lines of...
"They've taken the logic of Spock and put it into Data, they've taken his 'alieness' and put it into Worf...", and so on for every dissectable characteristic that I could transplant from TOS's crew into TNG's (initial) crew. But then we
are talking about Tropes here.
Even if the TOS-series writers
weren't looking for the "smart one, the fighty one, the impetuous one", deliberately, and just happened on that combination as that old Space Wagon Train started to speed up, I'm betting that the writing staff of TNG were very familiar with the elements of narrative and character that they 'ought' to have. And the whole thing about Trops is that there are 'Universals', that you ignore at your own risk. (Although feel free to play with and subvert them, almost immediately after convincing the audience they know how they are...)
Ok, I'm steering this in a new direction. Why would you love/hate to be Spock.
He doesn't belong. Half human, he
can be looked down upon by Vulcans, whilst obviously he's just
too Vulcan for most humans. He fits into Starfleet because his quirks are no more extreme in their quirkiness than others. (Oooh look, a black woman. Ooh look, a Japanse man. Ooh look, a Russian barely-more-than-a-kid. And how about that (Canadian-)Scot, eh?) By contemporary standards, that is. (Of the audience and, by inference, setting.)
So, being
The Amazing Paris Spock would probably be Ok as long as I was on the Enterprise (or have become the all-powerful and somewhat quixotic Ambassador he later becomes) and could live up to my role. And didn't take too much LDS.
And on the theme (literally?!) of Roddenbury... Has anyone noticed the shared musical segment in the title credits of both Earth: Final Conflict and Angel (of Buffy fame)? Must remember to see if there's someone with a musical credit in both series... (Or else they've just picked up the same stock pseudo-Irish/pastoral sound from the library, and plugged it into the rest of the sequence.)