I would badge this if I could. Our badge economy is collapsing. Wanna see an awesome quote? “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.” - Barbara Broccoli Worthy of note - Ian Fleming died in 1964, a year and change after Dr. No came out. The Living Daylights (1987) was the last Fleming bond, unless you count Casino Royale, which was a direct response to the Bourne movies eating Bond's lunch after Madonna fenced with a North Korean billionaire ice-racer who had a death ray satellite or some shit. Also worthy of note - Cubby Broccoli nuked one business partnership to buy rights to the Bond novels because his existing partner thought they were shit - he was right, by the way. Cubby also dropped Blofeld down a chimney so that he could show his second partner who was boss. The Bond movies have only been just barely based on Fleming's spy since the drop; the whole mess has always been "whatever the Broccolis feel like doing". Likewise, Gene Roddenberry has been dead since 1991 and was an alcoholic sexual predator while alive. The first series was noteworthy for having several brilliant authors contribute and then leave; Next Generation was noteworthy for having several brilliant authors contribute and then leave. DS9, Discovery and the later movies are all Rick Berman, whose principle trait was "he did what Majel Barrett said." That, of course, ran the franchise into the ground faster than you can say "north korean ice racing" so Paramount dragged Kurtzman and Orci into the frame to resurrect the thing but it's very much culture by committee at this point. I think Trek succeeds when it allows accidental brilliance. The more money there is in it, the less room there is for accident.
I’ll agree with almost all of this, although I’m agnostic on the alcoholism. But I think the other huge weakness here is just how “inbred” the entire thing is. There’s a lot of people working on the series who have done almost nothing else. If there’s a way to kill the vision of a scifi series (or really any series) getting a second or third generation of people who have done nothing else is a great way to do it. There’s not really an outside perspective, what exactly can aging trek actors turned directors bring to the series? What can Spock’s son literally raised on the set see here? In all cases, it’s soaked in that vision of what was. And it generally means taking fairly safe routes and going to the familiar, or going for the modern mania for deconstruction where you simply subvert and change things in odd ways just to change them. The Dune book series had the same problem. Brian Herbert simply is not his father. And so you have things that are safer if boring and bland. Or you have Kralizec in which Duncan Idaho teaches computers to share with humans. It’s lost a lot of tge mojo it had. It’s an adventure story now, with no more of that boring philosophy or science or weirdness that made the original story interesting.