That’s smart mind. TNG is baseline Star Trek for most of the franchise and is the best general starting point. Ds9 is fantastic but does rely on a familiarity with trek up to that point.

TNG first is the right way to do it. DS9 is in many ways a subversion and doesn’t work as well without that context. The weight of Sisko’s moral compromise from In the Pale Moonlight, DS9’s undisputed best episode, comes from the frankly kind of naive idealism of TNG. Without it, you just get another generic “morally grey” circle jerk.

For people who don’t want to sit through lie a 100 hours of TNG first, I’d recommend still watching it but using an episode guide to cherry pick the best/most important episodes rather than skipping it entirely.

Ooo, you could even interleave them as they ran in the 90s. There was like four seasons of overlap