Not to start an argument but at least TFA and the “subsequent garbage” had characters that grew and you came to care about, and were more than faces with a single trait.
To each their own, I guess. I never came to care about the ST characters and found them bland and unconvincing (aside from Han in TFA, but he’s not from the ST). I cared much more about the Rogue One characters by the end of the movie, and that was without any major character development or really fleshing them out. I think the difference was in the story. I found the RO characters believable because I found the story believable. I didn’t find the ST characters believable because the story was awful from beginning to end.
But this shows you how subjective this really is. It depends on your expectations and on what you look for.