I think they were pretty damn good, especially considering[ it was 1979 or so.

Maybe, but my main complaint about the movie isn't the quality of the special effects but rather their over-usage. Do we really need to watch fifteen minutes of the inital approach to the Enterprise? I think that wen you make a movie with special effects, you have to have more substance for the movie to grow old gracefully; you can't just rely on cool pictures. TMP doesn't, and in fact is glaring about it. But there's no accounting for taste!

And, honestly, I wasn't sure at the beginning of your post if you were referring to TMP or Nemesis.

lol.