The DSC design was deliberately meant to
bridge those two eras, both recalling ENT's aesthetic
and foreshadowing those of TOS and the movies at the same time.
As Scott Schneider says in the Eaglemoss booklet:
"We were constantly trying to tie into both the past and future architecture of Starfleet ships...we tried to tie stuff into the NX-01 and stuff that would come in the future, like the Enterprise-B
...we wanted to show some connection to the motion picture refit...get some of those details that you see on the refit in there, but to make it look as if they were in their earlier stages."
It was intentionally more contemporary in its practical execution, but
less futuristic from an in-universe perspective, than the TOS and TMP iterations. Quibbles aside, I'd say they achieved that goal reasonably well, overall.
It's simply a case of the same artist being given the same task twice, beginning from the same starting point and following the same extrapolative process, and thus producing accordingly similar results.
As Rick Berman said in the November 2001 issue of
Star Trek: The Magazine:
"We spent a lot of time studying the Enterprise
from the television series and then the Enterprise
from Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, and then the subsequent ships and a variety of other vessels. We wanted something that was reminiscent; we wanted something that people could believe would, 90 years later, evolve into Kirk's Enterprise
..."
The very reason why Eaves' design for the NX-01 was ultimately rejected is that it was deemed to look
too much like Kirk's ship for ENT's purposes.
From the standpoint of its
design, which is what we were discussing, it was meant to be
"the same ship that Kirk commanded at an earlier stage of its life, before several refits"—featuring
"more primitive versions" of
"various components" that
"would be replaced over time," thus allowing for a
"transition to the original Matt Jefferies ship later on."
In terms of
interpreting what's been depicted onscreen thus far, I would say your interpretation is an extreme (if not wholly unfair) one. Personally, I would concur that we are
probably meant to think this is indeed what the ship looked like at the time of "The Cage"—thus retconning the depiction there and in the (illusory) flashbacks from "The Menagerie" (TOS)—but only DSC showing its
own flashbacks to that time or earlier (which might happen, but we don't know for sure if it will) could confirm this concretely.
Likewise, if DSC were to continue into the timeframe of TOS proper, and show the
Enterprise again during Kirk's five-year mission (which I doubt will happen, though it hypothetically could), I'd agree that we might well find her similarly updated. But as yet, it's entirely premature to jump to the conclusion that she
won't undergo one or more overhauls that bring her much closer into line with how she was depicted in all the other series. (And if we
don't ever see her in that same period, the issue is rendered moot. We would be left equally free to imagine that she looked more or less exactly as previously depicted, one way or the other, or neither.)
-
MMoM
