Lot's of things have been official through the years. They don't all match up, some of the unofficial stuff is more interesting than the official, basing a new series on the Federation and Starfleet of the old FASA universe would be nice. Rich and complex.
I don't want to see anymore boring, in-house style cinematography, and that's the truth. I'm so sick of STAR TREK's television franchise steadfast refusal to get fancy with the photography. I want to see gorgeous lighting, interesting scene arrangements, stuff like that. I don't want to see repetitious, shoot it as fast as we can, to move onto the next scene crap! Sound trumps image ... so what? Audio Books is all STAR TREK should exist in, if that's all anyone cares about. I want the best photographers in the business being rotated and making their rounds. Maybe even bring in some experimental artists, if they have everything storyboarded out in their presentation and give them a shot! The time has come for STAR TREK to reward my eyes with the gift of surprise ...
There's no such thing as a "prime" Trek timeline. Trek has seen many "timelines" over the past 50 years. Original ST novels and TAS in the 70s continued the original Star Trek timeline only to be almost totally ignored by later Trek spinoffs. When you say "prime timeline," I'm assuming you don't mean the timeline established for TOS, TAS, and the 70s novels and novelizations, even though this "timeline" predates the movies and Berman-Trek and is in a much better position to be called "prime" Trek. Many Trek "timelines" have been established in various media over the past 50 years, and all eventually get ignored. The timeline established for TNG and the Rick Berman-produced TNG spinoffs (what most people mean when they say "prime") is no different, and neither more nor less valid than the 70s continuity or JJ Abrams' continuity.
Come to think of it, the Starfleet Battles universe would make for some brilliant storylines! Too bad SFB's creator and Paramount hate each other.
I do too, but I'd like longer than 2 seconds to look at it sometimes. The increasing tendency toward handheld shooting and fast editing gives less time to focus on production values since we're presented a new setup every few seconds.
I suspect you are right, for example I would favour a more serialised approach, with sotry arcs, but that doesn't mean I'm against an episodic show, all I ask for is continuity, don't say something in one episode only to contradict it four episodes later.
The Starfleet Academy idea... I don't know why that even came up, ever. When was the last successful film or TV show about university students or military cadets? I can't see any storyline for this, other than typical soap opera crap. But teenage soaps take place in high school, not university. And it would be over after 4 seasons.
TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9 and VOY are all part of the same timeline. I always thought that was pretty clear*. The Seventies novels and novelizations were never part of any canon, which I also thought was always pretty clear**. In fact the studio seems to have a much more direct relationship with novelizations now than it seems to have had in the Seventies, though I'm not sure exactly how that works. (* I would say ENT, too, but I'm not really sure what the whole Temporal Cold War business means for that.) (** Kind of a shame in some ways because I like John Ford's Klingons better than Ron Moore's Klingons, ultimately, but whatcha gonna do.) Oh, I can see a sound commercial reason for it in a way. ST09 basically was the Academy concept and a lot of people seem to have dug that, and certainly there are lots of successful television series (genre and not) about school drama -- this essentially is what Smallville was, for example. And of course Harry Potter was one of the major successes of cinema in the past decade or so. Abrams cut his teeth doing Felicity, a high school drama that became a college drama... and I think it's no accident that his versions of Star Trek's characters all act like college kids from such a show. I think it's a lot less interesting than Trek's original concept, but that doesn't mean there's no market for it.
-ONLY military ships -ONLY generational ships -a lack in the general diversity of the kinds of ships seen
Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind. Veronica Mars (like Buffy) graduated High School and went to college. Felicity was pretty good.
The premise of "cadets save the world" clearly ties in with the Academy concept and was also the premise of the "Academy Years" project that Bennett was working on before he left Paramount. (Ironically, Bennett did not care for ST09, though his particular version of the idea doesn't sound any less... well, let's just say I can understand why nobody warmed to it. )
That was probably the problem there, it wasn't a academy show as a basic concept that was the killer, it was the version Bennett put forward.
ER focused heavily on medical students. Jennifer Garner's character in Alias was in either college or grad school for part of the series. --Sran