The other point I think Voyager never really gets enough credit for is that Chakotay would probably be a pretty good XO to work under. This is to an extent that I don't think is true of the other Berman era XOs.
I like Riker as a character more than most people, but in some ways he was given the easiest possible ships to be the XO on. Most of the infamous discipline cases just wouldn't be on the Enterprise-D because Starfleet probably has a lot of institutional guardrails to keep that sort of person off the flagship. This is to the point that I suspect that a lot of his initial reaction to Ro may have been that he felt that it was officially not his job to deal with the infamous discipline cases and it hadn't been for a long while at that point.
With Kira, she was a very hands off XO, but she was always going to be like that anyway. Being a part of a terrorist cell probably does lend itself to that kind of command style to some extent. Besides, she was still new to a more formalised command structure and she probably felt she had more to learn from the people around her about what this style of discipline looked like than the reverse.
Plus, to some extent, most of the Starfleet discipline cases wouldn't be her problem. They'd be Sisko's problem, ultimately. Even though for the most part she's treated as if she has the authority of a lieutenant commander in a red uniform, if someone's going to be a problem, she'd probably still have to bump it up to Sisko because someone who has an issue with her isn't going to care about her situational authority but will respect his.
None of this is true for Chakotay. A lot of his crew on the Val Jean weren't necessarily Starfleet potential. Either they never went to the Academy, or they went for a little while and dropped out.
Because of that, he'd automatically have to do a lot of skills coaching for things that most people in Starfleet would be expected to know automatically. Given that outside of the initial growing pains, which were so minor that people have been complaining about this part of the show for nearly thirty years, the Maquis crew's integration into Voyager's crew was incredibly smooth, he probably was pretty good at this aspect.
This is something that even traditional Starfleet command officers struggled with. In TNG's Hollow Pursuits, Riker's initial reaction to learning Barclay was becoming a problem officer was, "Can't we just shunt him off somewhere else and let him be their problem?", and LaForge was all for this until Picard put his foot down and said, "No, you're gonna have to do your jobs on this one."
I think this is especially notable given that Chakotay was working with at least three people who had the reputation for being combative (Torres, Paris, and Seven). This was easier to an extent given that these three were easier to work with so long as they felt their work was properly valued, but there were a lot of other people who wouldn't have put up with them as much.
It's also notable because of all the XOs, Chakotay had the most reasons to have a lot of personal resentments towards his crew. Three (Tuvok, Paris, and Seska) had betrayed him personally, so it'd make sense on a personal level if he was a guarded guy who wanted to do the absolute bare minimum he could get away with.
So I think he has a level of professionalism that most people just wouldn't have. Voyager never really drew attention to this as much because usually if the show was explicitly drawing attention to his command style, it was because his was disagreeing with Janeway on something, but his professionalism was there.
When it came to discipline, the buck did stop with him. I forget which episode this was specifically, though I think it was Investigations, it's explicitly stated that Janeway lets Chakotay handle discipline on Voyager. It's not like on other ships where it could be bumped somewhere else, both because Janeway has made it clear that it's his job and because there aren't any other Starfleet ships in the quadrant (other than Equinox, which they don't know about until they do).
It does seem like he's ultimately able to do this effectively. While there are some episodes where there's a discipline case of the week, that just doesn't happen for the most part.
This is one of the reasons why I find it so odd when people say that Voyager wouldn't be as strict about the uniform after a certain point. Just as much as Janeway wouldn't have put up with it, I can't see Chakotay going for it, either. Maybe he would have been fine without a uniform code on the Val Jean, but that was under very specific circumstances. He just wouldn't have seen it as appropriate on an explicitly Starfleet ship.
A lot of this no doubt stems from how Chakotay had experience in both the Maquis and Starfleet. Don't forget that he was a lieutenant commander in Starfleet before he defected. It's been a long time since I read Pathways, but I think he may have even been a first officer at the time.
So while Riker only had the experience of working on Starfleet ships in that formal hierarchy and Kira only had the experience of working in terrorist cells before being on DS9, Chakotay had both. Besides being a good XO in general, I think Chakotay may have been a better XO for Voyager than Cavit, its original XO, would have been. He had the kind of broad experience needed to operate in that role at that time.
I know a lot of the reason Chakotay isn't getting the credit I think he deserves is because he was the most neglected character on Voyager, aside from maybe Harry Kim. Still, I think he really does deserve a lot more credit than he gets because even though it's never explicitly said, it is heavily implied that he's an incredibly good person to work under, even by the standards of the hypercompetent Starfleet the Berman era usually portrayed.
