And has heavily influenced EVERY other Trek design of the franchise in ways even the original ship did not. The aztec pattern on the hull, the circular docking ports, the angled clamshell shuttlebay, the overall profile of the ship and the glowing deflector dish, have all been imitated to a greater or lesser degree in every other iteration of the Enterprise or other non-hero ships. The Kelvinverse Enteprise borrowed heavily from that design as well, imitating elements like the hull plating, the phaser banks, the torpedo launchers, even the shape and position of the windows on the saucer and the bridge.
So it should be no surprise that the Disco version of the Enterprise looks like someone took the TMP refit as a starting point and then extrapolated backwards into what that ship was redesigned FROM. What you would basically get in that case is the the original "Phase-II" Enterprise design, which -- combined with the Discovery-series style elements -- is exactly what we got.
2001: a Space Odyssey was the watershed moment in Scifi set and spaceship design, so much so that everything that came AFTER it had a much higher bar to jump. To say that Enterprise looks more "modern" than most atomic-age ships isn't much of an endorsement; "Frankenstein" may be more closer to modern science fiction than any of its predecessors, but in a literary world that pre-dates H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, that isn't really saying much.
By way of comparison:
We're not talking about fictional Starship Design progression in the Federation, because Starfleet is not a real organization and no real progression actually takes place. What we're talking about is the progression of designs of starship models and technical designs, decade after decade. In that sense, the TMP design is literally what happens to the Enterprise after the end of the "atomic rocket" era of science fiction, defined by ships like the Discovery 1, the Nostromo, the Star Wars galaxy and the Battlestar Galactica. The TMP ship and the Enterprise-D are as much as part of setting those design conventions as they are influenced BY them.
More importantly: style cannot be undone. You can only get away with retrofuturism in an environment where you're really going all out for it (i.e. The Fifth element, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) but that's a stylization with far different implications and is harder to pull off realistically (and some people don't even try for realism, see "Mars Attacks!" or "Destroy All Humans!")
I don't mean to gloat (at least not entirely) but isn't this entire argument sort of moot anyway? All the people who said the TOS design was the only one that could possibly have worked have been proven wrong. The producers used the same basic shape and updated the design textures and structural elements, which is exactly what most of us thought they were going to do. They were NEVER going to use the unaltered TOS design, because they would have been stupid.
And this is the problem in a nutshell: you're thinking of Star Trek as a self-contained property that evolves along its own conventions and its own continuity with no outside influences from the rest of science fiction as a whole. This is not a realistic thing to expect. Star Trek is part of the broader context of science fiction as a genre and the people working on the show have worked on DOZENS of other properties over the years. There is no skill set particular to "designing Star Trek ships" nor is there any specific art style particular to Star Trek itself. So anyone who is brought into a Star Trek production will also bring the lessons and experiences of OTHER scifi productions into the context of Star Trek and will come up with designs consistent with this.
In other words, they have a different definition of "What has gone before" than you do. These artists are looking at the whole of science fiction as influences; that includes Star Wars, Babylon 5, Stargate, Interstellar; that includes military aircraft that hadn't even been conceived of yet in the 1960s and modern fighter planes like the F-22 and the F-35 that had barely been flight tested when TNG went off the air. That even includes the last 40 years of Star Trek designs, many of which were EXCELLENT, and should certainly influence future Star Trek productions even if those productions are themselves PREQUELS from an internal chronological standpoint.
You're thinking in terms of Star Trek's fictional history as if it were a self-contained thing. But there's ALOT more to science fiction than just Star Trek, and there's ALOT more to "what has gone before" than the classic Enterprise. Which, I suspect, is why this debate continues to rage on, stoked by people who have almost no background in graphic design and nothing to show for a career in art design. It's easy to make assumptions about how something SHOULD have been done if you have no real idea how it WAS done in the first place.
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