Ahahaha yeah that was wild! And by DS9's time, it didn't seem nearly as precious. Nog got into the academy just off Sisko's recommendations and entry seemed so guaranteed, Jake treated it as a take-it-or-leave-it situation.

Doesn't it imply Picard simply refused to vouch for Westley?

Iirc Wesley's disqualification was age related. He was a boy genius but there is enough of those in the post scarcity utopia that Starfleet isn't dumb enough to recruit all of them as officer, their lack of maturity could get them or others killed.

It was practically reverse affirmative action in that brightest youngsters could compete for a few slots to get into the academy a few years earlier. So he was not going up against the Miles O'Briens of Starfleet. He was going up against the Julian Bashirs who can ace nearly any standard test with their eyes closed.

Last thing Starfleet needed was impulsive teenagers to find them selves in command of veteran crewmen, react horribly to be given advice contrary to their current orders and get people or themselves killed. The Academy is for future officers, not the enlisted equivalent ranks that O'Brien filled. Wesley would have made a great crewman, he'd have made a terrible officer.

Ngl the critical reception doesn't really matter to me, though I bet it's a key performance indicator to the network, same with the viewership numbers.

I think it's good we're getting more Star Trek, almost as a rule, but I just wish I enjoyed watching the properties that came out more. SFA, Disco and Picard didn't click. Lower Decks was phenomenal and SNW feels closer to the mark but still feels off.

It's cool that they wanna take in spec scripts from other writers, though, maybe that'll bring back some of the feeling of the old shows.

Star Trek: Discovery was in the top ten streaming charts for 3 weeks in a row

Only 3 weeks? I watched the whole first season, and some of the second. The first three weeks weren't bad. A little rough, but as you mention so was the start of TNG. Some of us fans of the old stuff find it hard to stop giving Kurtzman Trek more chances, just because it's got the Star Trek name. I even watched the entire Section 31 movie and a couple episodes of Starfleet Academy. That's what it took to convince me it's really over.

They really have drifted away from that.

They are in radically different timeframes.

Moreover... Deep Space 9? This whole thing about 'Starfleet being a miserable job' is not a Modern Trek invention.

Yeah I'm here for science fiction not complete lunacy like the idea that Christianity is a positive force.

I'm not done with S03 but it's fairly minor, to be fair. He talks about being an altar boy (meaning there's organized Catholics still around) and says the lord's prayer when he's stressed.

It just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, because I so enjoyed the idea of a utopian future where these violent structures were left in humanity's past.

Right, except that the established ethos is that religions are not really all that compatible with the federation vision of the future and almost always lead to people doing horrible irrational shit.

He's not really Christian.

His father taught science but also comparative religion which led to Christopher getting kinda... confused. He ended up disagreeing with his father a lot before his father passed away when he was fairly young. This is talked about in Discovery Season 2.

Due to this, Pike has a sort of 'nostalgia' for Christianity with the connection to his father. There are a couple of scenes (in SNW) where he talked about the fact that he doesn't pray and isn't into it himself but that his father asked him to. He does pray in a scene but it is even started off by him talking to his father by saying "You win dad" and starts reciting the lords prayer. He's not actually religious himself but in the scene in which it happens it's done as a demonstration that Pike has done literally everything that he can in all of his science prowess and in a sign of sheer desperation falls back to the worry he had with the loss of his father and starts focusing on something his father taught him.

You didn't miss it because it isn't true.

Actors have a larger reach than a Twitter troll, though. So it sounds like they're hostile to people that haven't really done anything. It just comes off as much more combative when we only see one side.

You seem to have missed my point. It doesn't matter if the fans can come up with better ideas or not. Their opinion is 100% valid even if the fan can't create anything better.

Also, it's almost definitely not an actual invitation for fans to submit ideas. It's very well known that for legal reasons writers aren't allowed to read fan ideas because then everything the writer writes in the future would be ripe for plagiarism lawsuits