I've always detested Picard, from episode 1 (of course, I detested all of them at episode 1 ... took a chunk of time before I could be dragged back, kicking and screaming the whole way, to give them another look-see after that horrific pilot!). From my POV, he's an condescending, holier-than-thou, humorless, by-the-books upper management type who lacks both the charisma and the capability for independent thought a starship captain needs in order to go where no man has gone before.
That being said, I actually LIKE the way they played him in TNG, if that makes sense. My distaste for Picard is a personal response to the kind of man he was portrayed as being, not a dislike for how the character was articulated in terms of telling the story, nor a disbelief in the verisimilitude of that character in either the TNG universe nor the show itself.
That was one of the stronger aspects of TNG for me, once it crawled past Gene's moratorium on inter-crew conflict (which it never fully did, but which it at least partially accomplished after that first year). TOS really didn't have particularly well defined characters on the bridge other than the triad. VOY and ENT, later, pretty much designed characters I loved en mass from the get-go.
But TNG had several foundational character designs that I literally detested ... but yet they managed to tell stories I enjoyed with those characters in ways that left me thinking "I hate that guy ... but I so believe he would have done that. Or I so know people just like him. Or he wouldn't have been able to make it work if he hadn't been that guy I so detest." Which is a good thing for character complexity, particularly in an show predicated on a more-or-less ensemble cast.
So from my personal "I'm a fangirl and Trek really exists in my world" perspective, I hated Picard. But from a storytelling perspective, I actually kind of liked him, particularly in terms of how well they played Riker and Picard off one another. And as a writer myself, I often enjoyed writing him, if for no other reason than how mentoring his relationship with Riker was, and how much of a struggle it always was for me to portray him accurately to the canon specs rather than tweaking him up to someone who wouldn't irritate me with his condescending inaction as much as he inevitably did.
But to answer your base question of expanding on why/how I detested Picard? Probably easiest to explain it by saying Captain Kirk was the ideal starship captain for me. I was really only interested in watching the charismatic cowboy, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, relatively irresponsible but always heroic, save-the-world-or-blow-it-up flavor of Captain leading the crew into the heart of whatever adventure lay ahead. So while Kirk hit every one of my love buttons; Picard, at best, kinda bored me and, at worst, put me into an foot-stamping outrage, often in conjunction with his interpretation of "The Prime Directive."
No captain who would let a pre-warp society be destroyed by calamatous natural events rather than interfere in their extinction, and who would justify his fatal inaction with the dumbass notion that it is their destiny to go extinct and no one has a right to interfere with their destiny by making first contact before they were culturally "ready" for first contact ... yeah. I'm always going to hate that captain. Always. And Picard was the poster child of that, and of everything I've always hated (and still hate) about The Prime Directive, which is good in theory, but which must be flexible in application or it becomes the antithesis of the original spirit of the directive.
So while I didn't disbelieve that Picard would act as he often did, nor that he was an arguable philosophical stalwart of The Federation's ideals concerning The Prime Directive, I did hate him for acting as he did, and for doing so under justification of the holier-than-thou philosophical tenants he cited as his reasons for doing so. And I usually hated TNG's version of Starfleet and The Federation right along with him ... probably why I bonded so hard to the Maquis movement in Voyager, and to Chakotay in specific.
That being said, I actually LIKE the way they played him in TNG, if that makes sense. My distaste for Picard is a personal response to the kind of man he was portrayed as being, not a dislike for how the character was articulated in terms of telling the story, nor a disbelief in the verisimilitude of that character in either the TNG universe nor the show itself.
That was one of the stronger aspects of TNG for me, once it crawled past Gene's moratorium on inter-crew conflict (which it never fully did, but which it at least partially accomplished after that first year). TOS really didn't have particularly well defined characters on the bridge other than the triad. VOY and ENT, later, pretty much designed characters I loved en mass from the get-go.
But TNG had several foundational character designs that I literally detested ... but yet they managed to tell stories I enjoyed with those characters in ways that left me thinking "I hate that guy ... but I so believe he would have done that. Or I so know people just like him. Or he wouldn't have been able to make it work if he hadn't been that guy I so detest." Which is a good thing for character complexity, particularly in an show predicated on a more-or-less ensemble cast.
So from my personal "I'm a fangirl and Trek really exists in my world" perspective, I hated Picard. But from a storytelling perspective, I actually kind of liked him, particularly in terms of how well they played Riker and Picard off one another. And as a writer myself, I often enjoyed writing him, if for no other reason than how mentoring his relationship with Riker was, and how much of a struggle it always was for me to portray him accurately to the canon specs rather than tweaking him up to someone who wouldn't irritate me with his condescending inaction as much as he inevitably did.
But to answer your base question of expanding on why/how I detested Picard? Probably easiest to explain it by saying Captain Kirk was the ideal starship captain for me. I was really only interested in watching the charismatic cowboy, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, relatively irresponsible but always heroic, save-the-world-or-blow-it-up flavor of Captain leading the crew into the heart of whatever adventure lay ahead. So while Kirk hit every one of my love buttons; Picard, at best, kinda bored me and, at worst, put me into an foot-stamping outrage, often in conjunction with his interpretation of "The Prime Directive."
No captain who would let a pre-warp society be destroyed by calamatous natural events rather than interfere in their extinction, and who would justify his fatal inaction with the dumbass notion that it is their destiny to go extinct and no one has a right to interfere with their destiny by making first contact before they were culturally "ready" for first contact ... yeah. I'm always going to hate that captain. Always. And Picard was the poster child of that, and of everything I've always hated (and still hate) about The Prime Directive, which is good in theory, but which must be flexible in application or it becomes the antithesis of the original spirit of the directive.
So while I didn't disbelieve that Picard would act as he often did, nor that he was an arguable philosophical stalwart of The Federation's ideals concerning The Prime Directive, I did hate him for acting as he did, and for doing so under justification of the holier-than-thou philosophical tenants he cited as his reasons for doing so. And I usually hated TNG's version of Starfleet and The Federation right along with him ... probably why I bonded so hard to the Maquis movement in Voyager, and to Chakotay in specific.
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