im not sure how one is slapped across the face with normalcy but if you’re saying discovery didnt go far enough with the barely-disguised left wing messaging we usually see in star trek i agree wholeheartedly

In fairness, that messaging has taken rather a back seat ever since Trek became big, probably because the networks see it as a cash cow, and no longer give it liberty to take the same risks.

DS9 only got as far as they did pushing the boundary because Voyager had most of the attention, for example.

You don't really see any new Trek show pushing the boundary quite like TOS did back in the day, to the point where it was very nearly cancelled outright due to the outrage it produced. Roddenberry even wanted to add an LGBT character to it at some point, but it was shot down by the other producers. Compared to TOS, Discovery's representation and messaging is almost contemporary, with relatively little boundary-pushing.

Compare to that to the Orville, which doesn't have that baggage by virtue of being new, and relatively unknown, so they can get away with more on-the-nose messaging a good bit more without getting into trouble. There's no established IP and format that the network would prefer that they keep to, or stay uncontroversial so it's still palatable to wider audiences.

I mean, yea, basically. They didn't let the concepts steep enough so the allegory took back stage to the simplified moralizing.

I'm not necessarily against any general angle they took, it just didn't really do the star trek intellectual thing where they're actually competent professional adults dealing with something. The general mood of the writing is just ... too straight forward plain Hollywood. Sure, Star Trek has its TV schlock, but it was that angle of at least trying to make everyone logic-first adults that made it great.