I had to go back and check and I actually did finish season 5! I just haven't started season 6 yet.
Sadly, if you did start Season 6, it wouldn't exactly encourage you to keep watching. In fact, it'd make things worse! Season 6 was when I started losing the will to live while watching (although 4 was a letdown and 5 was hard to get through), except for the Christmas episode. That's why those last two seasons took me 8 years. Season 6 totally turned me off.
I almost feel it'd be worth it for you to just skip ahead to Season 7. You'd have to deal with 7 rough-ish episodes and get to see MELROSE reborn. It wasn't perfect, as the balance between earthier late-90s drama and batshit crazy soap took some time to figure out, but it became a MUCH better show (Peter Dunne was involved).
From today's perspective, Melrose Place's seasons are just too long and that makes it hard to binge-watch the show – especially the later seasons where the pace had become much slower. In today's streaming world, we are used to shows with 10 to 12 episodes a season, and even those shows usually have a few filler episodes.
Theoretically, if Melrose Place had been a "regular" network show with 22 episodes a season, it could have run for over 10 seasons with its total amount of episodes.
Oh, I never tried to or had any intention to binge-watch MELROSE. I did/am doing all the major primetime soaps on a weekly basis. But I agree with you. Binging even the good stuff like Season 3 might be too much; the pace so fast, the developments so crazy, you'd get whiplash!
If I have finished season 5, then that's probably more episodes of Melrose Place I have seen than I have seen of Dynasty considering how Long Melrose Place seasons are. Only I would have watched DYNASTY countless multiple times. I doubt Melrose Place will get a re-watch any time soon.
This got me curious and I checked. Turns out, DYNASTY and MELROSE had almost the exact amount of episodes! With DYNASTY's long seasons (it did almost as many episodes as MP) and MP's shorter run, it balanced out. But, yes, DYNASTY is more re-watchable. I have been wanting to go back to the beginning with MELROSE but shudder at the sheer effort that would take....