'Star Wars is not future, blaah blaah.' Do you really think casual viewers care about that? They might be vaguely aware of it, but they're not going to care about it.
I'd hope they'd be more than
vaguely aware of it, it is literally the first thing they are told in every single Star Wars movie. The disclaimer that it isn't our future is so famous you can quote it out of context and people know immediately what you mean.
Star Trek on the other hand has consistently been the future of
our world, even altering its own past to fit when advancing reality overwrites its speculation. It is the 'vision of the future',
our future. And how we imagine our own future evolves with time, and artistic fashion, and the changing nature of technological progression. When the 1701 was originally designed, the future was all about jets and flying cars and moon colonies. Big advances were expected in the aerospace industry, but other things like communication, recording and recalling information and computing weren't in focus. You can see it in all kinds of futuristic settings from the period (check out Gerry Anderson's vision of the early 21st Century). By the 00's, the opposite was true. We had no flying cars, deep space sleeper ships or jetpacks. 99.99%+ of people still haven't left Earth. Instead we had pocket phones that connected us to all the world's data, and rapidly developing social connections heavy on user generated media. Our computers have overrun the capabilities of even the 24th Century ones. If Trek doesn't move with the times it just becomes a show about what the 60s thought the future would be like. I'm not saying you couldn't have a show like that, but it wouldn't be Star Trek.
Star Wars is an entirely different beast. It is a space fantasy set in some far flung galaxy where the physics isn't quite the same, there's a mysterious Force, and part of the aesthetic is retro, used and dirty from day one. You don't change the universe any more than you give Aragorn a bazooka.
They don't make the ship look more modern.
They make it look more contemporary.
The classic Enterprise is an iconic design, which basic shapes have endured for more than fifty years. The new DIS-Enterprise is SO friggin contemporary - like the need to make Superman's trousers disappear, or make all the colors look washed out, or cluster every friggin surface with so many details no basic shape is visible anymore - it's emblematic of an entire contemporary design language of an industry, that is going to age as badly as the all-leather and sun-glasses look combined with techno-music of the Matrix and all it's copycats from the early 2000's.
Or the 80s-as-hell TNG designs. Sci-fi properties scream the era they are made to the heavens, just as much as the hairstyles and presence and/or style of jeans will tell you when a romcom was made. That's not a criticism, really, it is just a fact. And one that makes genre stuff so fascinating - often they tell you more about an era than the stuff that was deliberately set then. Films and TV either aim to be contemporary to the era they are made, or they are by default because they are
made then. Check out
Stranger Things - for all the effort put into recreating the 80s, it is so obviously made by the Tumblr generation, it's not even funny. It's not just true of filmed media, either. I'm reading
The Mote in God's Eye at the moment and I guessed its publication year within 18 months without looking by all sorts of tells - the technology described, the particular brand of self-conscious sexism, the expectations of space travel and aliens, the design of an alien civilisation. Sci-fi has always been contemporary in its era.
But is still very noticeably the Enterprise, that's the point.
They didn't 100% change it from the original. You should it to any casual fan and they'll recognize it.
This. Nobody was under any doubt at all that it was the Enterprise.
That argument could be made. I don't remember Khan ruling the world in the 90s.
He wasn't in
Future's End either - Trek happily rewrites its past to stay in our universe. Undoubtedly once we pass the 2060s without Vulcans, a future Trek series will retcon that.
To throw some more fuel on the fire, they also redesigned the Jupiter 2 for the upcoming Lost in Space Netflix series. Here it is. Why did they not just leave the original design?!?!?!?
This Lost in Space revival will give me a great chance to look at ourselves from the outside. I am what we refer to as the 'casual viewer' for Lost in Space. I saw a bit of it as a child, I'm vaguely familiar with it and the basic characters and concepts, but have no investment in it as a sacred canon. Similar to my situation with nuBSG, actually. I will watch nuLiS develop with interest as a parallel for the casual viewer of DSC.