Your assumption of not having decades of baggage is incorrect. I have seen all of Star Trek and with the exception of the original series I have seen it multiple times. In fact, we're watching TNG again now, which for me is probably the sixth or more time I'm watching it. I watched DS9 again a couple of months back. There isn't a year that goes by that I don't watch at least one Star Trek series. If someone where to ask me about my all-time favorite TV shows, I would mention Star Trek and Stargate. I'm not really certain which is my favorite to be honest. I'm just not that hung up on it that I can't watch the new series and judge them purely for what they are. I don't need to draw a relation to the previous series per se. I just love seeing Picard in action again, even though he's obviously rather old. I'm glad we have this opportunity to witness Patrick Stewart do his thing again while he's still alive. Picard remains the best Star Trek captain ever, regardless of how anyone feels about the new show. Whatever happens in this new series, will never ever be able to taint the standing of Jean-Luc Picard. Only the potential to elevate him further is available. Sure, this new show is very different, but these are very different times and both society and technology have changed dramatically since TNG was made. That is something which needs to be accepted. You can make a black and white "dumb" movie (meaning no spoken words, just images and maybe background music) now and there will be people who like it, but the vast majority would ignore it, because times have moved on and people expect more for their entertainment. I'm not praising the new show right now. There are definitely parts of it which I don't think are great. For example, I find myself wondering how much re-watch value this show has. TNG has a tremendous re-watch value and it will likely retain that value in the future. I'm not sure if Picard will have this. That is something which will depend entirely on how the show develops. There were plenty of dull episodes in TNG, but overall it is still a fantastic show. For Picard, episode two was rather bland. Episodes one, three and four were however much better than two. A major difference with this show of course is that it's serialized. The story unfolds further and further with each episode. TNG had only stand-alone episodes, with a story contained within a particular episode. This means that in order to truly be able to judge the value of Picard, we will have to wait until the entire saga has been completed. Things may seem unimportant or dull now, but something could happen later on which brings things to another level and completely changes the perception of the things we have seen so far. I bet everyone has seen at least one movie which at first appeared to be a time waster, but then near the end it had a twist which turned the whole experience around and forced to rethink the things before it and made the movie perhaps more memorable than others. I'm not saying this is what I expect to happen with Picard. So far, I am gladly following along and I'm looking forward to new episodes. The end of episode four certainly brought a cliffhanger feeling for me, even though it's not really a cliffhanger, just the introduction of a new character. I can't wait to see what happens in episode five.
For me, seeing the Romulans like this, and seeing how they have ignored the Romulan Empire and the Romulan culture has destroyed it. The pseudo scifi tech, the intentional insertion of memberberries to try and stitch this show into canon, all are fails for me.
They evidently did not have to pay for the old Romulan bird of prey shown in Picard, because it is not the original design. The Picard version is much larger than the original. Mostly, my issues with Picard have to do with the entire existence of Soji and Dajh (who was killed). Supposedly, they were created by Bruce Maddox who allegedly found a way to clone Data's positronic net from a single "positronic neuron" 