I share your discomfort with social gatherings.

INDEED.

non-ironically, seven of nine was the best thing that could have happened to voyager.

one of the side effects of the producers pushing ‘jeri ryan in a catsuit’ as the new hotness for dudes 18-34 was that she inevitably got a lot of screen time.  and the writers were forced to do interesting things with her so they wouldn’t hate their jobs, and since jeri ryan is a fantastic actress, seven rapidly went from ‘most-written’ to ‘best-written’ character on the show.  and as it turned out, introducing a new character with such a disparate outlook into the frankly kind of bland voyager dynamic (which by s3 felt like a version of next gen where nothing new ever happened, bc tng ended as voy began so by s3 the writers //had// been writing tng for ten years) turned out to be exactly what the writers needed to shake everyone else out of their holding patterns too.

the same basic thing happened three years earlier when tng ended and worf moved to ds9, becoming even //more// awesome in the process and personally embodying the turning point from star trek as we knew it to the dominion war.

ten years later pretty much the exact same thing happened on sg-1 which, by season eight, had gotten equally long in the tooth as trek in 97.  they wrote in claudia black as a thief in one episode and vala stole every scene she was in for the next two seasons.