I am still watching the first season with Sheridan in it, maybe it gets better when Boxleitner shows up. The guy playing Sheridan is an awful actor.
Mmm... Boxleitner played Sheridan in this show! I think you meant Sinclair.
I really loved the first season. Michael O'Hare was great. I liked him more than Boxleitner. The way O'Hare said "This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258, the name of the place is Babylon 5!" sounded really great. Better than when Boxleitner said it. Agreed, O'Hare looked like a Thunderbirds puppet, but with a voice like his he could have made a fortune as a voice-actor. I was not happy with the B5 movie "In the beginning" though. Too much about Sheridan and only stock footage with Sinclair.
But when I first saw B5, I loved it, but I wasn't completely hooked on it. It's only by the middle of the second season that I became hooked. Although I missed Sinclair in the later seasons, storywise halfway through the second season things start happening. Perhaps you should regard the first season as an introduction to the characters and the first half of the second season as an introduction to Boxleitner's character. From there on things go forward.
I must say I prefered the storylines about President Clark to the ones about the first ones. I didn't really like the first half of the 5th season (telepath storyline) but the second half of that season (problems with the Centary) wasn't bad at all.
The movies Thirdspace and River of Souls weren't to my liking, but A Call to Arms was great. The spinoff Crusade wasn't bad but it was not as good as B5 itself. Legends of the Rangers didn't quite do it for me either.
About the figures, there was a 9" line with removable clothes, but it didn't have the quality the Playmates Star Trek 9" lines had. The B5 figures had obviously cheaper bodies, bad head sculpts and clothes that were waaaay too wide. I have a G'kar and a Sheridan figure.
Here's a bit of personal trivia. In may 2002 a went to the FedCon convention in Germany for the first time. While walking through the dealer's room I ran into Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin) and had a chat with him. Two years later, in may 2004 I again went to FedCon. I was in the same building when they told me he had passed away a few hours ago. Now that's creepy. It gave me goosbumps.