Talent may be subjective, but I think there's a very strong argument for Lin being up there with Wise.
In terms of resumes, there is simply no comparison between Lin and any other Trek film director besides Wise. Even if you consider Meyer circa Star Trek VI, he still had way less experience than Lin. For Nimoy, Shatner, Carson, and Frakes, it was was their first times directing films. I suppose you could say Carson had a long television directing career, and Frakes had a not nearly as long career directing television. For Baird, he was only on his third film, after a career as a hyperfast action editor.
Wise started as an editor too, but had a long career as a director with a wide variety of genres, never really imposing an auteur's aesthetic with his films, treating them very professionally as a craft.
Lin started out with a couple of indie movies, his most famous one being "Better Luck Tomorrow," a challenging film about the Asian American experience, and how it conflicts with the narrative of the model minority. He brought one of those characters into the Fast and Furious franchise and fought to make Tokyo Drift a movie that shows Japan as slick and modern, as opposed to the original concept which exoticized Tokyo into a land of stereotypes.
Coming off of the disgrace of casting a translucently white actor as Khan when they could have made an experienced and talented Bollywood star a crossover superstar, or at least made the lateral move of casting someone like Benecio del Toro, it looks like Lin is correcting for some of the mistakes of the previous films.
This movie looks fun, is less focused on the villain than the theme and mystery (which is what JJ always claims to favor, even though neither of his Trek movies featured much mystery), and looks like it will actually show the politics of an alien society, and possibly the abductions of various peoples.
But beyond that, this actually looks much more fun than the dour and bleak past few villain-centric movies.
I'm pretty excited by this trailer.
