Depends on the story, and IIRC it has shifted with time. But yeah, the general trope is they are stuck in a small vessel, and they offer/are extorted into one or more wishes to free them. Why they are stuck ranges from evil sorcerer trying to enslave them to noble hero stopping their rampage.
Yeah, I would have been 11 when it came out. I definitely had heard the original, but couldn’t say who sang it or anything. I wouldn’t call it “the sing from Shrek,” but I also can’t really remember the original and think of the Shrek version. I’m not surprised anyone younger than myself would call it that though.
Janeway takes Torres under her wing a bit too, and talk shop often. I think the rise is almost exclusively due to the Captain being a woman and having at least a single head of staff be another woman means any episode the captain has to consult that character means it will pass. The 7 bit is just gravy filling in episodes that isn’t the case.
I tried to go back and watch it as part of a kind of personal nerd pilgrimage. I just couldn’t get through it to save my life. Then I hit the beginning of TNG and was shocked, that was not what I remembered at all from all the reruns I saw growing up. I’m honestly still kind of shocked it lasted long enough to grow the beard.
I mean, she wasn’t jiggling. Carrie had often complained about how tightly bound she was, he specifically didn’t want that look either. Nothing at all in that outfit would have honestly made a huge difference in how the whole thing felt I think, at least in hindsight it would really cheapen it.
Pathfinder 1st Edition was a branch of DnD 3.5, it is occasionally called 3.5.5 or 3.75. It is pretty much a 3rd party patch for 3.5 but uses the same core systems. That, 3.5 and PF1e, is kind of a mess.
I’m not surprised you find PF2e confusing, but from a design standpoint I would call it clean, considering everything that is going on. It is deep, but well organized. As opposed to DnD 5e, which is relatively shallow, which can make it easier to jump into, but not as well organized. The messiest part of 5e is the “natural language” philosophy they went with, which can leave a lot of rules ambiguous. It was supposed to make it easier to intuitively pick up and play, but it also makes it much easier to have misconceptions and anything that is slightly unintuitive can easily be accidentally used the wrong way for ages. PF2e might have a lot of interconnected rules depth, but it also has a less ambiguous guide for dealing with it, which is what enfranchised players will generally mean by “clean.”