Would a Galaxy class starship have an easier or a more difficult time in the Delta Quadrant if it was in Voyager's place?

Yes.

What do you mean, it wasn’t a ‘yes or no’ question? Fine.

Both, then.

In some respects it’d be much easier for them. Remember all of those resource shortages, the replicator rations, the “oh shit the lights are about to go out” moments that Voyager had? Aboard the Federation starship USS Galaxy, those would be a thing of the past. Or at least… the distant future.

The Galaxy-class starship was designed from the get-go to be a long-range, independent explorer. She was specifically designed to fuck off into deep space and poke every space wedgie she could find, for upwards of a decade at a time without support from the rest of Starfleet. That was their flimsy justification for allowing families and children to live aboard Galaxy-class starships and share in the mortal danger, incidentally. After all, it’s perfectly OK to put your kids in extreme and regular danger if you’re really really really going to miss them loads and loads and loads while you’re on a deep space assignment. That’s why, in the Real Life Dimension, soldiers take their children to the battlefield with them when they’re posted on long-term… oh no wait, that’s not a thing at all, nevermind.

They can manufacture their own antimatter. They’ve got over a thousand people living aboard, so they don’t struggle quite so badly if they lose a few of them to space wedgies - there are always going to be replacements available who aren’t cantankerous holograms. Must feel nice for the crew, to be so expendable.

If they did somehow suffer from an energy crisis and needed to grow their own food, the ship started out with at least one hydroponics lab (mentioned in “Disaster”), so they wouldn’t need a Space Pixie to come along and put a handful of plants on five shelves in a cargo bay. They also had at least one bloody arboretum:

“Look ma! SPACE LAWN!”

If they needed more than that, they had cargo bays coming out of their arses.

There’s also the tactical situation to think about. Remember that initial fight with the Kazon next to the Caretaker’s array? Voyager’s crew needed to throw an entire actual starship at the Kazon Predator that turned up to fuck up their day. They just didn’t have enough firepower to take it down.

The Galaxy, on the other hand, was the closest thing Starfleet had to a battleship - just those main phaser arrays on her saucer outclassed anything Voyager had access to. She was a beast. She’d be taking that Kazon monstrosity out by herself, without even needing to put Deanna Troi at the helm so that she could crash into it. They might even have been able to hold the Caretaker’s array for long enough to send themselves home right at the start, leaving some time-delayed photon torpedoes behind if they absolutely must exploderise the thing. And they had dozens of scientific laboratories, with a university’s-worth of scientists staffing them, to help them figure out how it worked.

In part thanks to her “fuck off by yourself for a few years and don’t come back until you learn something interesting” design ethos, the Galaxy was heavily shielded and well-armed. She had to be, because you never know what kind of nasty alien of the week you might encounter on your travels, and it’s not like you could call for reinforcements when you’re gallivanting around beyond the fringes of known space. Shit, her sheer size could be enough to deter some would-be attackers.

She was slower than Voyager, yes. Considerably so. If you pitted the Galaxy and Intrepid against each other in a drag race, the Intrepid would win without much of an issue, unless the Galaxy cheated and used a tractor beam on her. We’re not talking about a drag race here, though; we’re talking about a marathon. And there, the Galaxy-class’ fuel tanks are almost as big as an entire Intrepid-class starship, and it can make more fuel on-the-move. She’s the tortoise, Voyager’s the hare.

Long story short, if you’re involuntarily embarking upon a long voyage, you really want to be aboard a Galaxy-class starship if you can. That’s what they were built for. That’s what they were designed to do. No other type of starship in Starfleet was more up to the challenge of a trek across the Delta Quadrant without support than the venerable Galaxy. Upon being stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the captain of the ol’ NCC-70637 could just aim for Earth, engage the warp drive, and fuck off without stopping for ages.

And therein lies the problem.

One of the reasons Voyager got home so quickly was because they kept stopping for supplies and to investigate shit, just in case they found a new way of producing energy or something. If you don’t need to do that, because you can just fly off and maintain cruising speed for a good chunk of your remaining lifespan, then you’re not as likely to find the myriad short-cuts that the crew of Voyager fell face-first into on a nigh-weekly basis.

Would the captain of the Galaxy maintain Janeway’s attitude of “let’s stop every five minutes and poke that space anomaly with a stick, just in case a new warp core falls out”, if s/he had no real reason to stop for supplies? I’m not sure. Yes, that’s the Starfleet way of doing things, but the Galaxy would have sweet and innocent children aboard too. If you had children aboard your ship, and you were lost in deep space with no chance of rescue, and you didn’t need to stop for some dangerous adventures, would you still stop and have some dangerous adventures every week?

Captain Baldilocks was a renowned explorer, but his attitude in “Where No One Has Gone Before” seemed to sum up what most captains would probably do in such a situation. The Enterprise was lost in the middle of fuck-knows-where thanks to Kosinski and the Traveller dicking around with the warp drive, and Baldilocks was desperately trying to get the Enterprise back home. Kosinski suggested that they stop panicking quite so much and avail themselves of the exploratory opportunities, to which Picard answered, “and we report our observations how? To whom?”

The way I see it, if the Galaxy doesn’t manage to get back to the Alpha Quadrant right at the beginning of the series, by fighting off the Kazon and using the Caretaker’s array to get home immediately (which is a possibility), then we’d probably be looking at a generational ship. They’d just point themselves at Earth and plow forward until they got there, only stopping once in a while to make repairs or gather any resources that their Bussard collectors couldn’t pick up from space.

Of course, such a series wouldn’t have been much fun to watch (it’d basically be Star Trek: Are We Nearly There Yet?), so it would inevitably be written differently. None of this is actually real, you know. Right…?