The knock against Shatner is long and storied. An old drinking buddy of mine worked at Paramount Studios on the shooting of the "Next Genration" series and the other Star Trek projects and was wealth of inside stories and spoliers regarding that series and the behind the scenes dramas of the Trek businesses in general. Shatner had made such a pest of himself, the producers of the series and the movies wanted no part of him and have continued to avoid all matters Shatner. The anomosity was/is so deep, the producers even had an inside joke at Shatner's expense in the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". There is a scene where the DS9 crew, travelling back in time to the TOS Enterprise, are very keen to meet the legendary crew. A couple of the DS9 characters go into the Enterprise's lounge and look around for Kirk. One of them catches sight of someone seated at a tble and asks the other DS9 character "Is that Kirk?" The camera shot changes to show an overweight, older man with an obviously bad hairpiece.
Shatner's problem is an old one in Hollywood: stars begin to believe their own P.R. Even after the critical and fan panning of the Shatner-directed "Star Trek V", Shatner conttinued to insist he wanted to direct more Trek films, wanted to "write" (his actual writng contributions are questionaable, and he wanted (as he did on TOS) all stories and scripts to be fully centerd on him. At one point, he even started to demand casting approval and other "rights" reserved for the producers and the studios. The producers responded by just cutting him out of all things Trek. That is why other TOS cast members appeared in the later series as guest stars and Shatner didn't; he is conspicuous in his absence.
If you can find it, there is a book titled "The City on the Edge of Forever" where the legendary battle between SF writer Harlan Ellison, Shatner, and Roddenberry over the TOS episode of the same name. It is quite a good read. Ellison worte the original screenplay for the episode, only to have Shatner and Roddenberry gut the script to basically accomodate Shatner's ego. I once had the opportunityto hear Elllison spek on the matter and he relates a very telling story of his meeting with Shatner, at Ellison's home, to have Shatner read the script. The whole event was a shambles from start to finish, capped off when Shatner, having just finished reading the script, paused, quitely. Ellison thought Shatner was letting the story sink in when Shatner re-opened the script and ran his fingers over the pages, counting as he went. Ellison then realized Shatner was counting the number of Kirk's lines in the script to see if any other character had more lines than Kirk. From there things went really downhill...
There is a ton of Shatner stories around Hollywood and, unfortunately for Shatner, not a lot of them are glowing. I even had a converstaion with a limo driver who drove Shatner around and he told me Old Bill was one strange handful...
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