I am not sure I would say smarter because there is some pretty dumb stuff but they were at least trying to tell stories about Sci-fi concepts and dealing with moral problems in space, so they get marks from me for that even when it didn't work and we got "a night in sickbay" which is the worst thing to ever be labeled Star trek.

Still they sometimes had good idea that worked or would have worked if the network had not gotten in the way. Braga wanted Year of Hell to take up a whole season of the show and leave Voyager weaker then it had been before with a smaller crew so in future episode Janeway would have to make more treaties and bring new aliens on to the ship to make up for the lost crewmen, he also wanted to ditch the replicators so Voyager would be forced to look for supplies more. In other words he wanted to do BSG seven years before it turned up on tv but the network said no and changed it into a two parter that featured the reset button being hit at the end. So not all the problems were the fault of Berman and Braga. in fact it is looking more and more like Paramount are the ones without a clue and they need to stop messing with Star Trek before they completely destroy it.