He needed some time to grow into his role too. He was clearly still getting into it in Season 1 of TNG :)

One example that comes to mind is the end of the first double-episode encounter at farpoint. Where he's like "Let's see what 's out there! Engage!". That really looked like stage acting.

Some hardware developers can also make nice single page apps. That doesn't mean hardware developers generally make better single page apps than anyone else