appreciate that Joel

They solved this problem in DS9 with the Defiant using the following template:

There was a film like that, it's called First Contact

DS9 starts as an almost completely different series but at the start of the 3rd season (and again at the start of the 4th) the studio pressured the writers/producers to shake things up and make it more action packed.

touché

Remember of course that Ebert can't speak due to his cancer and has to use a Stephen Hawking-like simulator. I'd imagine these responses are quite long given how long it takes to type them.

My assumption was always that special effects got cheaper over the course of DS9 as they moved from models to CGI, hence why they were able to do  more in the later seasons than the earlier ones despite a declining budget.