Personally, I think the problem with Galactica nowadays is that the world is generally far more depressing than it was when the show came out. I can take dark and gritty, but it was more fun then. Now, I prefer something more lighthearted.

Like the flashback episode of SNW, where we saw Chapel and M'Benga during the Klingon War. My first though was "this is awesome, I could watch a whole show like that", but shortly afterwards, I realised "nope, that would be way too much, bring back Captain Daddy making jokes about how flipping the communicator open is better than tapping a commbadge.

Or maybe I'm just more of a miserable bastard than I was 20 years ago. IDK.

But hey, for any sci-fi fan, I'd certainly recommend at least watching the miniseries that kicks it all off. Get a feel for the characters and the universe they're in.

I've never watched Babylon 5. Everyone always raves about it, but I don't know if I could get past the extremely dated looking effects.

Plus there's so much new content coming out. I can't criticise anyone who doesn't want to watch older stuff, because who has the time to watch it all?

That being said... you have seen Firefly, right?

There's a lot of fighting between DS9 and B5. The story goes that B5 series creator J. Michael Straczynski had shopped the series bible around, including to Paramount. They weren't interested, but when they heard it got picked up by WB, they rushed their own space station based Star Trek series forward. With people coming over from TNG, they get a pilot ready faster than JMS can create a series from scratch.

Since they had the B5 series bible, there's long been allegations that DS9 is a ripoff of B5. Indeed, there do seem to be some elements stolen out of it. For example, the pilot of B5 has a "changeling net" technology that lets people impersonate each other, which had apparently evolved out of an early draft of a changeling species, which DS9 copies outright.

What Paramount studio execs did was definitely underhanded. They were deliberately pushing out a show to make sure B5 wouldn't get to the same level of popularity as Star Trek. They probably did steal elements from the B5 bible and pushed Berman and Piller to use them.

However, fans make more of the similarities than are really there. Berman and Piller were almost certainly unaware of why the studio was pushing certain ideas and where they got them from (and JMS said as much at the time). Most of the stolen elements are ultimately superficial. The way the central conflict unfolds is very different, the characters are very different, and the technology is all different. B5 doesn't center around a planet coming out of a long term colonial authoritarian government, and DS9 doesn't have humanity crawling out of a war that nearly destroyed it and which ended for mysterious reasons. B5 doesn't have an excellent father-son relationship, and DS9 doesn't have a wisecracking ambassador who's very likeable despite doing some incredibly fucked up things.

They are both excellent shows, and well worth your time.

Battlestar Galactica’s miniseries (episode 1) is just so mind fucking blowing crazy good that just by itself it excuses the lower ratings episodes later on. And there are some, it’s not all 8+. But when it hits, oh boy does it hit.

I’m not sure how it would be on a rewatch, since I watched it from season 1 as it was coming on air, and half the fun was basically spending hours on forums discussing theories about the show between episodes.