It was a hell of a ride. My favorite Star Trek series I would say (we've also watched Voyager, TNG, some of TOS, Lower Decks, and all but the latest season of SNW). It started a little slow (and kind of cold? like the warmth between the characters just didn't exist for like an entire season), but it got so good after 2-3 seasons, and basically stayed good the rest of the way.
Probably my favorite Star Trek cast as well. Some really great characters (I especially loved Kira, Odo, Sisko, and all three of the main Ferengi), and no major characters I found too annoying or bland, which is a bit of a flaw of all the other series we've watched. Won't name names because I'm not trying to ding those otherwise excellent shows, but yeah, the DS9 cast really aced it.
Great and really diverse roster of villains, too! Dukat is an all-timer, even though I didn't care much for what they did with him after he lost his mind (everything up to and including that finale is excellent). Weyoun, the Founder lady, the Section 31 guy, Kai Winn (as much as I couldn't stand her)--just a really interesting assortment of people with understandable motives, not just stock bad guys at all. Damar snuck up to become one of my favorites too, really nice arc for him when he started as seemingly just Dukat's sidekick.
The Dominion War has to be my favorite piece of serial storytelling in any Trek, not that there's a ton of competition there. Wrapped up maybe a little too quick-n-tidy but overall, that whole piece of the show will stay with me and will eventually compel me to watch the series again.
The pah-wraith stuff on the other hand... wasn't ever much of a fan and it felt like the ultimate conclusion of that and of the Sisko-as-the-emissary story was pretty blah. I was surprised they didn't find a way to fold that into the Dominion War. I basically just assumed that releasing them from the Fire Caves would briefly turn the tide of the war somehow, and Sisko would have to turn it back, but they kept the two strands entirely disconnected and Sisko goes to deal with it after the fact by just kind of knowing he needs to. Just a strange choice that made it feel like ultimately the writers were much more interested in the real-world politics of the war than the magic-hoohah of the Prophets. (Which is strange too because the previous big episode where Sisko talked the Prophets into making the Dominion fleet vanish inside the wormhole seemed like a pretty clear model for the kind of thing that might happen in the finale, but didn't.) If they had folded that into the war, and made the war seem like more of a looming threat to Bajor (which also kind of just stopped at some point), the idea of Sisko having this grand purpose would have been more fully realized, I feel.
In a way I felt like that part of the finale anticipated how the show Lost wrapped up. You spend all this time building anticipation to something epic, but then the writers can't really think of anything more to do than a magic fistfight in a cave.
Apart from that, I actually quite liked the finale. Solid conclusion to the war, bittersweet endings and partings all around, satisfying wrap-ups for Quark/Odo and Bashir/O'Brien (both of them two of my three favorite relationships in the series, the other being Sisko/Jake which sadly didn't get the sendoff it deserved).
I read comments from other viewers who felt the finale didn't wrap up what they thought of as the main storyline--Sisko bringing Bajor into the Federation. I actually feel like the series pulled a bit of a trick there but maybe could have underlined it more. The story ultimately isn't about Bajor joining the Federation, it's about this Federation guy joining Bajor. By literally going to be with the Prophets, he is "of Bajor" (as they liked to say) and his purpose has been fulfilled--it's just not the purpose he thought he had in the beginning. I like that, it just could have been emphasized more somehow, perhaps.
Terrific show. Really made me miss '90s Trek. I like some of the new stuff too (especially Lower Decks, which we've watched twice) but something has been lost, a bit, in the transition to the streaming model and these short seasons with higher budgets. Give me 24-25 episodes on a relative shoestring any day. Let me marinate in these characters and stories a while.