54 Votes in Poll
They're all good, enough I'd rather not pick favorites at all due to how close it is...but I had to settle for Guinan in the end.
Jean-Luc!
Followed closely by Data & Worf
Who are followed closely by Rivas Jakara.
My favorite is Data. He’s a very unique and interesting character with a complex arc. I relate to a lot of his own challenges with wanting to understand those around him. Plus I like androids as a species (are they a real species who knows :P)
Picard of course.
Troi outdoing Guinan and Bill? Wouldn't have seen this coming...
I like her character, but relative to the others in the poll... don't know.
Whooooo, Data's on the second 🥈 place!!
I would have somewhat expected him to be first, though I voted Worf, for other reasons.
Females seem to loose... Certainly not because they were not interesting characters, or because we're misogynic in some way. But can we see a pattern here? At least for Troi and Bashir (not so much for Guinan) I always thougt the characters had potential that was very seldom used in the actual scripts. Troi was most interesting on screen when interacting with her mother.
I think there's just an inadvertent bias for Picard and Data among the TNG characters simply because Picard is also the captain, and a particularly famous one among the fandom, and Data is a particularly unique character and thus stands out more. So viewers tend to remember and thus favor them a bit more out of the others.
And I think it somewhat understandable. Guinan, after all, while a particularly stand out character herself, was always a bit more supporting character than main character throughout the most of TNG and its successors. Troi, meanwhile, had her moments in the spotlight to be sure, but they were a little rarer and didn't always hit the mark or stick out to viewers as much due to failings in the storytelling (but not the characterization). Plus, episodes where her mother featured, said mother tended to dominate the viewer's attention.
If we could've included a few more of the female cast members from TNG, I'd like to think there might've been a greater chance of one of them rising higher in the poll then though.
I would definitely have put Geordi LaForge or Beverly Crusher in the poll ahead of Guinan.
What do you think?