there is no discrepancy that can't be rationalized with minimum effort.
Why bother?
Rationalizing a thing rarely makes it plausible - if something isn't at least intuitively wrong there's no real urge to rationalize it at all.
The pre-1979 version of Trek fits okay with the first six movies - everything was looser and more improvised - but doesn't belong in the Roddenberry Revised Universe.
Which rather makes sense, as the intent with TNG was so clearly to recreate Star Trek as a thing more satisfying to the 1987 version of Gene Roddenberry while deprecating the movies that had followed TMP.
1987 and later is a different animal.
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