STO feels like it had great potential, world building, stories; only for that to get put on the back burner once the fomo and whale concepts started to really sink in.
Nowadays it is literally just people sitting around outside earth space dock or deep space 9, talking about cosmetics and miniscule improvements obtained through spending money, for pointless damage optimization that has literally no purpose because the game has no end game of any kind. Only occasional minor story arcs being added accompanied by more fomo content.

The "benchmark" for performance is how fast people can utterly annihilate a colossal armada of borg cubes and queen vessels in some scenario queue. Not if they can beat or survive it, how fast they can steamroll it.

I'm definitely there for the storylines - it's pretty much a single-player game as far as I care. And I don't have a lot of time for the min/maxers, either.

The company has gone through a rough patch with the Embracer nonsense, but we generally get a new story mission every 3-4 months.

Yeah that's fair, definitely the best part of the game (and entirely free to play for anyone interested!). Just don't let yourself get suckered into those fomo systems.