Returning to Earth before the finale
One of the ideas for the finale would be making a faster return to Earth and leaving more time in the finale to explore the crew’s return to Earth and how they felt about being back. Roxanna Dawson, who played B’elanna Torres on Star Trek: Voyager, loved the idea of returning to Earth before the end of the series.
Dawson spoke to Trek Monthly (via The Hollywood Reporter) about that and said;
"My only criticism is that I wish we had started to deal with the ending a little bit earlier, instead of just in that last two-hour episode."
Now, this could mean setting up the ending, or exploring about bout plans to end the show in earlier episodes or it means exploring Earth itself and the lives of the crew on the planet. Any of those would’ve been good, even all of them.
The show never did set up how it was going to close out the show. There was no master plan they were building to, or seasonal arc that would lend one to believe the show wasn’t going to end just like Quantum Leap did.
The final episode before the two-part series finale was Renaissance Man and was a singular stand-alone episode that saw the Doctor playing hero.
With the next episode being the first part of a two-part finale, one would imagine more time going into how the show was going to end.