Notice I didn't actually say inferior.
Reed is portrayed as a Chocs Away! Brit from a family with a naval tradition. Even if the series were set in the present, that would be so anachronistic as to be a vintage notion.
He is also characterised as being the antagonistic, stuffy misery-guts who never has personal encounters, but goes to pieces when he does. This is a typical characterisation of a Brit for American tv, and it's just lazy writing. From Star Trek we expect better.
Hoshi, if you remeber, was a bag of nerves when the series started. They devoted whole plots to it, if you remember. Notably the "oh my god, I have such little faith in my ability to translate stuff. Everyone expects too much of me because they say we ASIANS! are a lot smarter than our caucasian counterparts."
You probably won't have noticed the inexplicably dismissive looks Archer occasionally gives her (I say Archer, and not Bakula, because I think it was directed that way.)
Travis is an odd one. Despite having more hours in space than anyone else on the crew, he is portrayed by the behaviour of the other characters as being tiresomely naive about the dangers of space travel. What's interesting about him is that his dialogue (and to a certain extent screen time) dropped sharply to NOTHING for long periods, as if nobody needed to hear from him.