Yeah, if you are going to have intergalactic battleships that can eradicate planets I think it is super forward thinking to have an extremely empathetic therapist sitting right next to the captain.
It is too bad Sirtis’s character was never really given agency or allowed to be smart, but at least as Star Trek fans we all know who Deanna SHOULD be and can imagine how badass and effective she was at that especially with a captain like Picard who was fairly effective at getting input from his crew.
I think the most hilarious and best way to head canon Deanna is that we are watching a public record of Starfleet’s flagship diplomatic starship and that it mightttt be considered a bit controversial that the captain brings a semi-telepathic advisor into almost every interaction with outside groups and individuals that aren’t part of the federation and they almost NEVER openly reveal this to people they are interacting with even though that might really really really piss a lot of people off. In this head canon Picard leans on Deanna all the time for critical advice about assessing the intentions of groups and individuals and she more than Riker or Data effectively functions as the second in command on the ship. Unlike the way she is portrayed in the “public record” (the tv show) where she is frequently in high stakes meetings as eye candy but rarely gets to function as an expert advisor, in reality Deanna would quickly deduce the precise motivations and intentions of individuals in the vast majority of situations and would basically hand Picard the blueprints to what the villains of the episode were going to do.
I mean, how much deus ex machina stuff does Data do that ends up saving the day? How much of that was things Deanna figured out and Data was able to rapidly construct another method in parallel they could have figured out the truth and saved the day and implement it without highlighting that Deanna just fucking read everyone’s minds.
The official starfleet record that we get to see in TNG is that she always just got headaches when bad stuff happened and was totally helpless because again people might be a little upset if Starfleet was manipulating high stakes diplomatic situations with a psychic they didn’t tell the other people involved in negotiations they had.