Voyager didn’t always have the best wrighting. It tried to follow the writing style of The Next Generation, which didn’t work alongside the larger story arc of them trying to get home. So the quality of storytelling was all over the place and nothing that happened in a previous episode had any bearing on a subsequent episode unless it was a two-parter.

The original idea was Voyager was going to get more and more battered and ramshackle as things went on, but they decided that would be too expensive to model so they didn’t do it. The only remnant of this that we have is The Year Of Hell episode.