The thing about really long series is that they start to develop their own tropes. And if they go on long enough, they get the opportunity to subvert their own tropes.
There's a sort of running gag with the Star Trek engineers. Something will need to get done, the captain asks how long it will take, and the engineer gives an estimate. The captain will then say they need it done twice as fast, or more. They then usually pull it off somehow. This is the done thing. TVtropes calls it "Scotty Time", after the engineer from the first series.
We get this same interaction over and over across multiple series, from multiple different pairs of captains and engineers. By the later seasons of Next Generation they're already riffing on it. One scene establishes that the initial estimate is usually actually already longer than they'll actually need, because captains love to pressure their crews and the engineers know this, so getting it done in less time than initially proposed makes them look good. This ritual has by this point been established as Starfleet standard, seen in the original series, Next Generation, and prominently in Deep Space Nine.
So then we get to Star Trek Voyager, and we have our captain Janeway and our chief engineer B'elanna Torres, and we know how this is gonna go. In a season one episode, sure enough, Janeway asks that whatever needs to be done gets done in half the estimated time, and... Torres stops her. No, she says, it takes as long as it takes, it can't be done faster. And her face is dead serious. Janeway is momentarily surprised but doesn't protest. And it's some great characterization for both of them. It establishes Torres as an honest and hard working officer, a straight shooter who doesn't take shortcuts. She'll look her commanding officer in the face and just say the truth. And it establishes Janeway as someone experienced but not incapable of adapting to her crew. She knows how this interaction is supposed to work, but takes Torres at her word, and doesn't repeat this trope for the rest of the series. I like it a lot. Idk end of post
In addition in star trek lower decks theres a whole episode about how the entire cerritos crew always adds and uses "buffer time" to allow themselves more time to chill and do stuff in their own way (which for that ship makes some sense given the amount of miscellaneous non work related stuff they get into) while also making it seem more impressive to their senior officers when they do it faster than expected.
Also the ship falls apart quickly when this time is removed which frankly kinda tracks cause a lot of the starfleet officers we hear from usually have pretty strong personalities and their own ways of doing things efficiently
