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Rick Berman and the studio basically said to me, "Okay, this is the last season and whoever's watching the show in the seventh season are people who are already invested in the show and characters." They allowed me to take a more serialized approach in the final season. So we did storylines [...] And the quest to get home got played out in a more serialized way than it had been in previous seasons. The lack of serialization before wasn't really driven by the creative desires of the writers or the cast, but driven by the economic realities or at least the perceived economic realities of the long-term health of the show and the ability to show it in repeats and to foreign viewers.

 

[...] as I said, I wanted to make that last season as serialized as I possibly could, even within the framework of the stand-alone episodes.

Rick Berman and the studio basically said to me, "Okay, this is the last season and whoever's watching the show in the seventh season are people who are already invested in the show and characters." They allowed me to take a more serialized approach in the final season. So we did storylines [...] And the quest to get home got played out in a more serialized way than it had been in previous seasons. The lack of serialization before wasn't really driven by the creative desires of the writers or the cast, but driven by the economic realities or at least the perceived economic realities of the long-term health of the show and the ability to show it in repeats and to foreign viewers.

[...] as I said, I wanted to make that last season as serialized as I possibly could, even within the framework of the stand-alone episodes.

Before attempting to offer a (possibly partial) answer, let me admit that the question seems to me to have indeed a high degree of subjectivity (e.g., it is not clear why specifically a six-episode epilogue is discussed as a possible alternative choice), something that you already seem to recognize ("this question kind of assumes a particular subjective view"). Nevertheless, I will try to shed some light in the decisions that led to the finale, quoting from the oral histories included in the relevant chapter of the 2016 book by Mark A. Altman & Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years - From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams.

Before attempting to answer, let me admit that the question seems to me to have indeed a high degree of subjectivity (e.g., it is not clear why specifically a six-episode epilogue is discussed as a possible alternative choice), something that you already seem to recognize ("this question kind of assumes a particular subjective view"). Nevertheless, I will try to shed some light in the decisions that led to the finale, quoting from the oral histories included in the relevant chapter of the 2016 book by Mark A. Altman & Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years - From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams.

In fact, the most direct (although still not explicit) testimony that something like that could not have happened even as a thought, comes from Rick Berman himself, and, rather unsurprisingly, has to do with the very essence of Voyager:

In fact, the most direct (although still not explicit) testimony that something like that could not have happened even as a thought, comes from Rick Berman himself, and, rather unsurprisingly, it has to do with the very essence of Voyager: