I was thinking the same thing, but you know, they managed to make them pretty central for almost the whole show, that’s why it seemed so jarring now. They did the whole show not knowing how big they were going to be and they still got great scenes.
Tbh, it seemed more a slight miscalculation on the writer’s parts on what to focus for them than actually ignoring them completely. For whatever reason, they decided to give them the additional conflict of a public coming out, and I appreciate the intent, but it didn’t really fit with what their issues had been? So instead of concentrating on and hashing those out and then having them together, they tacked that on and it took up their screentime. On the one hand, yay for a grand gesture, but given how many times we’ve seen them separate, it’d be nice to see that final forever reunion.
But I do get your overall point, that allllll of this was written before they had any idea of the ship’s success and if we found the latter eps not as good as the previous, well, they wrote the previous really darn well then, huh.