Okay I have bitched about STD quite a bit but the third season actually does feel a lot like an improvement. Characters are less snarky and the setting is less grimdark (although still dark but it does have some optimistic moments), and the music has improved a lot, and became one of the key elements to invoke emotion because the characters can't really do that. Burnham still doesn't work for me and Georgiou is a ridiculous character who should just be killed off because she's literally worse than Hitler and comically evil yet works for Starfleet. They're also going soft on the memberberries, although this episode has one particular big one. The fact that they draw the memberberries now from DS9 and VOY might imply that they finally got their heads out of their asses and went beyond "member Spock? Member Enterprise?"
It's super woke though. Last two episodes had a non-binary character and a transwoman. I don't particularly mind it as long as they don't go down the road of a black Mary Sue with Burnham the last seasons. The pacing is also considerably slower - the shaky cam shots and people shouting unintelligible stuff over each over during an action scene is still there but much, much less. A lot of the meat of the show now seems to be putting characters into very emotional confrontations, it has an episodical feel towards it, although it's still fully serialized, they seem to go for a "mission of the week" sort of rhythm embedded in the larger story. However, it still misses the typical moral and philosophical challenges of the old Star Trek, I've seen none so far, besides constant references to Federation values.
Can't say much about the storyline so far, although they set up some eerie mysteries that do sound strange and interesting, like the fact that nobody knows what the "Burn" was, an apocalyptic event, and that strangely everybody knows the same music piece inexplicably, there are also possible implications that they are actually not in the 31st century because some stuff feels sketchy. Problem was in the first two seasons they also gave us some mysteries but were resolved absolutely horribly, with the Red Angel being Burnham herself, that was even predicted by the retards from /strek/ back when 8chan was around. If they manage to not fuck it up, keep the pace and give us a decent resolution, this season might actually be a somewhat decent sci-fi piece - with the three big weaknesses of a) rushed character development, b) problems in regards to the suspension of disbelief with a 1000 year old ship standing their ground and c) some uninspiring aesthetic choices despite STD clearly focusing a lot on aesthetics this season.
It's definitely better than Picard although that's an incredibly low bar. The actress who plays Burnham tries to act her heart out this season but she is just no very well written, feel kinda sad for her.