Star Trek Voyager came to life when Paramount feared they were putting their biggest cash cow at risk.
Star Trek: The Next Generation had just gone off air and Deep Space Nine, the only remaining Trek series offering new episodes, had failed to capture a large enough audience.
Paramount knew the answer lay in returning to the roots of GeneRoddenberry's creation and extending them in new directions.
Roddenberry had originally meant for Star Trek to be some kind of Western in space. The allegory being that like in Western people went 'west' to find more farmland, in Star Trek Kirk and 
his crew went out to 'boldly go where no one has gone before' and find strange new worlds. A 'trek' to space, so to speak.
In Voyager, they once again used that premise whereas DS9 lacked it. 
To bring new excitement into the series, they stranded Voyager in the Delta Quadrant. The producers felt that the Alpha Quadrant aliens weren't new enough to the fandom anymore, that their story telling material had already been covered in the previous series. The Delta Quadrant would bring new stories, new aliens, new worlds and most importantly, new adventures.

Now TPTB (The Powers That Be, the producers and writers) needed a way to actually get Voyager to BE in the Delta Quadrant. 
They used an issue first tackled in the TNG episode "The Journey" and more prominently in later episodes of TNG and DS9. The Maquis, terrorists and freedom fighters at odds with the Federation Cardassion peace treaty, would be stranded in the Delta Quadrant along with Voyager and become part of the crew. Great potential for dramatic conflict.