My husband swore by B5 and had a hard time convincing me, especially since the CGI effects have not aged well and in general the sets, costume, etc. feel cheap. He was right, though: I really enjoyed it, although I think it took a season or so to really get into it. The writing is surprisingly good, especially later on, and it has complex alien characters in a way that a lot of scifi series struggle with.

There’s a widespread belief that Deep Space Nine is a knockoff of Babylon 5. B5 was apparently pitched to Paramount before they started work on DS9, but they turned it down. So it’s certainly possible that DS9 is at least inspired by B5, although I think people with more inside knowledge tend to doubt that it’s directly ripped off from the B5 pitch as others claim. It’s clear though that there is a deep similarity between B5 and DS9, and considering B5 aired later it’s natural that people feel the need to defend B5 on this point — it’s not a cheap ripoff of DS9, if anything, DS9 is an expensive ripoff of B5!

All that is background for me saying that I think B5 is a better DS9 than DS9 is, but DS9 might be a better show. What I mean by that is that the original concept that DS9 and B5 share, that of a multi-cultural space station resolving diplomatic disputes at the edge of human territory, is much better done in B5 than DS9 where it’s almost secondary to DS9 as a military outpost in the Dominion war. That said, DS9 had a bigger budget, better effects, and in my opinion better actors, so it’s easier to get into than B5. It just looks better.

Another interesting thing about B5 is that its creator, J. Michael Straczinsky (think I spelled that right?) was Terminally Online in a very early age of Online. He had a reputation for getting into dumb but heated arguments with fans on Usenet, which is pretty funny to think about now. This was a particularly big deal when the lead of the show had to be abruptly changed between seasons 1 and 2. Years after it became public that this was because of the original lead actor developing some serious mental health problems, but JMS understandably didn’t want to talk about that in public and so the abrupt and unexplained replacement lead to a lot of flamewarring (mostly under the presumption the original lead had been fired) that gave the show sort of a bad reputation among some.

I’d totally recommend that you watch B5, just be prepared for a rough given the much poorer production quality. It does get better over time, and most significantly the acting gets a lot better over time as cheesy stereotypes evolve into more complete characters. Of course pretty much every show goes through that evolution but it’s especially important with B5 where Londo starts out as an annoying guy with annoying hair. He remains as such through the rest of the series, but also gains other traits to the extent that he’s one of the more relatable characters.

There’s also a really funny left turn that happens in the last season - the last season is good! but there was some weirdness that happened where the last season was bought after the writers had already wrapped up the show (they thought they wouldn’t get another one), so they had to swap around episodes and come up with a whole new arc for the last season. The result is actually some of the best episodes of the series since they end up with sort of “free time” episodes to dig into aspects of the world that you don’t get much other detail on. The original finale of the series got moved into the actual last season, so the finale of the second to last is an episode they kind of shoved in at the last moment that is, admittedly, half clip-show but also explores the world of B5 in a really interesting way that we probably wouldn’t have gotten if the writers room didn’t have to scramble to produce something that was both fast to shoot and a satisfying season end.

Oh, and I didn’t even really address your actual question, I just rambled about television scifi for a long time like I’m prone to do. I think you’d like B5: it does have a definite aspect of moral parable to it, but it’s a more complex and nuanced one than most TV shows of the '90s. I think that’s part of the reason it didn’t get the kind of big-budget production that Star Trek did. It’s not set in a post-scarcity, largely post-politics utopia like Star Trek. The world of B5 is very political, and there aren’t really any “good guys.” Humans (from the central government charmingly called EARTH DOME) are just as much a part of the problem as everyone else, and I think the show does a much better than average job of representing different interests that have to come to compromises to get along, and the real political and cultural results of scifi concepts like telepathy. It’s not all happy endings!