Story wise I think it blew Star Trek out of the water, I really do. I much prefer the dark, gritty and realistic locales of B5 over the white polished Apple spaceships of Star Trek.
Spend a little time in the DS9 universe, which arguably has more in common with B5 than the rest of the Treks. (Supposedly, the show's core concept was stolen from a pitch by Straczynski which was declined, with B5 following through shortly after on a different network.)
As a big fan of B5 (it's one of two shows I own on DVD; the other is Firefly) who is currently 5 seasons into DS9 on Netflix, I find the "stolen concept" concerns overblown. I've heard people try to compare tiny elements from the two shows, saying "look at what a rip-off this is" (as if the Trek writers took JMS's five-season script and cribbed from it liberally), but it strikes me as more like the Trek writers took a little inspiration from JMS's pitch and then went an entirely different direction with it.
I mean, they are both space stations with numbers in their names. The remaining similarities are equally superficial. They're not really trying to tell the same type of story -- B5 is about massive-scale diplomacy (with war as an extension of diplomacy, like Clausewitz said) and empire-building. DS9 is mostly standard Star Trek style one-off episodes: aliens who feed on creativity, time travel to Roswell, Bajoran politicians abusing power in trying to recover stolen farm equipment. Even the "big" storyline of the Dominion War is a much smaller scale than B5's Shadow War. Sure, they both had huge battles, but I'm inclined to blame that on advances in CG -- ST:TNG certainly referenced huge battles, like during the Klingon Civil War, but never put them on screen.
Thus, I contend that DS9 has way more in common with the rest of the Treks than it does with B5, and liking one won't translate into liking the other.
> the Trek writers took a little inspiration from JMS's pitch and then went an entirely different direction with it.
Agreed. It was a minor dick move, but a far cry from a creative rip-off. DS9 goes its own direction (influenced heavily by BSG's Ronald Moore), and stands on its own two feet.
> liking one won't translate into liking the other.
Not necessarily, but I do think they're cousins, in that they both take galactic politics seriously (the miscellaneous Trek one-offs notwithstanding).
