One thing is true - everyone experiences the time in uniform differently, influenced by their personality type, biases, work ethic, and all the other factors we use to evaluate “the good, the bad, the ugly.” One person’s good is another’s bad. Until you are actually at sea, on the bridge, standing watch, or running your division or doing any of the hundreds of other things that make up a day (and often a night) during an operational tour, you don’t know what it’s like from reading about it.
Oddly, it can often be an exhausting, I-hate-this experience, but when stuck at a desk in a cube at the Pentagon, all you can think about is being back on the bridge wing on a moonless night, thousands of miles from anywhere, watching the phosphorescent trail in the ship’s wake and looking into the endless vast glitter of stars overhead, with a cool salt breeze on your face and listening to the wash of the ocean as the ship pushes and rocks through the waves on her course. You can love, like, loathe, tolerate life as a SWO or any community, sometimes all in the same day!
As with any military specialty area, there are cycles of relative satisfaction, strong retention, followed by cycles of dissatisfaction with QOL, deployment lengths, training, optempo, career opportunities, leadership, etc.
I encourage you to read sailorbob and other sources, but with a balanced eye and open mind.
Here are other true things. Active duty and veterans, whether separated or retired, almost always have opinions on how things used to be done, shouldn’t be done or should be done. That has been true at least since Noah last cruised on USS ARK.
) bretheren and sisteren and for most SWOs that I've known, the CVN is not a fun place to be.