I’ve tried to get into STO multiple times over the years and I’ve always found it to be frustratingly buggy. It’s not unplayable, but it has enough bugs in it that I get annoyed and stop playing at about the same point each time.
The ship combat works decently well and is fun, but the ground combat is really rough in my experience.
I honestly assumed STO died years ago.
I kinda quit playing it when greifing the ERPers stopped being fun (or even all that possible), since the rest of the game had stopped being fun quite a while before that.
Hard to say if someone other than Cryptic is good or bad for the game, given Cryptic was always pretty shit.
I played on and off since it became F2P and only got back into it last year when I built a new PC. The overall quality had improved over the years and they’re definitely pumping out a LOT of new content