It sure was disrespectful of that set wall to be so unforgiving of Nimoy lightly "falling" against it in "Charlie X" (TOS)...
At least in-universe we can pretend Charlie really did throw Spock hard enough to break it (and his legs)! (And speaking of run down, it looks like it could use a wash, too. I guess unlike Picard's, Kirk's Enterprise didn't clean itself...and like Harriman's, the janitorial staff doesn't come through until Tuesday!)
In my experience of DW fandom, its use there is generally more affectionate than derogatory. (And apt, even if not literally accurate. Heck, sometimes they weren't even "cardboard"! A whole wall of the original TARDIS interior was just a painted canvas...and guess what...they didn't recreate that when they brought it back for cameos in the new show.)
As I read it, its use here is more derisive of the unfair expectation on the part of a few fans that DSC can make itself legitimately part of the same continuity as TOS only by taking its production values as literally as "Relics"/"Trials and Tribble-ations" (both of which only took that approach insofar as required to match actual footage from the show itself) or "In A Mirror, Darkly" (which took it somewhat less so, introducing a number of subtle updates—as "Trials" did too, with the elements that didn't need to exactly match existing footage—but nonetheless was meant as a similar exercise in pure fan service and nothing more) did.
Yet that budget was still spread much thinner, because they had to create so many more futuristic sets/models/props/costumes/VFX/makeups out of whole cloth than a typical show of the period.
In 1978, television was still not high-def. And here is what Motion Picture art director Richard Taylor had to say about the Phase II sets and miniatures:
When we first came on the project we had to look at everything that existed and Roddenberry said, "Just use the sets that we're building and the models we are building." So, I gave the models [an] honest look but had to tell them in the end that "If you use these models and sets, you're going to be laughed out of the theatre." The models would have been embarrassing at best. They were really old school in their detail and were not built to armature and light the way we needed for motion control. They looked like the old television show. Again, Don Loos built the Enterprise and Magicam built the dry-dock and a few other things but they were building for a television movie. The resolution of television is forgiving; the big screen is not.
Nobody would ever have been able to make out the finer details (or rather, the lack thereof, because including them would just have been a waste of precious time and money) on TV. They were what they were due to being made to the requirements of the medium they were intended for, right down to the garish colors. As TMP costume designer Robert Fletcher said:
Another thing I changed was the basic color concept. The original Star Trek was brightly colored. But a lot of that came about because color TV had been recently invented and all the networks wanted as much color as they could get for their money, right away. I used to get directives from NBC to use more color. ‘We spent a hundred million dollars to invent this system and we don’t want any grays or browns.’ So I felt, and Robert Wise felt, that the brilliant color was not very realistic, that it seemed distracting. He wanted to concentrate on people's faces or the emotion involved, and bright turquoise and red things vibrating on a widescreen were not what he wanted to do.
(Of course, at the same time, they also had to take into account that many would still have been watching on black-and-white TV sets. Everything was a compromise.)
Ultimately, it's always been up to us to make things "fit" on an in-universe level. And there's nothing more stopping us from pretending TOS "really" was more advanced and detailed than what we "saw," or was an inaccurate dramatization (or Talosian illusion in the case of "The Cage"), or indeed will still come to pass exactly as depicted through uniform changes and refits (there'd be enough time for several TMP-level ones in the span between the two pilots) and whatever other "unlikely" circumstances we can (or can't) imagine, than there ever was. All that's changed (and not really even that, because there were people who said it about TMP and TNG and ENT and ST'09 too) is that some among us don't feel like keeping up their end of the pretense anymore...for pretense is all it has ever been.
That's not a problem. That's just what inevitably happens in serial fiction that runs long enough to transcend its mundane origins. It's what keeps it alive and enjoyable instead of being an artifact in an archive, studied only for historical purposes. In the end, this is all to TOS' benefit, not its detriment.
-MMoM
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