Ah! But if you're not blaming Kurtzman for everything wrong with Star Trek since 'The Cage', you're not a real Star Trek fan. Those are some hardcore internet facts right there you know?
Real Star Trek hasn't existed since 1969. There. Someone had to say it. I can't wait for the next adventure after "Turnabout Intruder(TOS)"! I hope we find out if the Enterprise looks any different!
Forget Roddenberry's vision, I want Star Trek to follow Freiberger's vision. Every budget needs to be cut in half. Plotlines non-existant and inconsistent. Let's end this whole franchise by the end of the year and call it a day.
I want every episode shot on a black soundstage with props made from paper. And reuse more reaction shots. I want my new Trek to look like a high school production of Star Trek staged during district-wide budget cuts.
I think ST Picard had an opportunity to showcase previous 24th century design Starships we saw, just upgraded/modified to have them keep up with the times - especially when showing that large SF fleet of ships that answered Picard's plea. In fact, these ships should have a lifespan of at least 100 years (much much more if SF is regularly upgrading them). And given SF ships versatility/modularity, upgrades would be a perfect way to maintain a ship which has survived in active service for say 150 years. Its design would also change over time I imagine and general hull materials and overall support structure upgraded with the times too (by harvesting the old and reconverting it into new - minimizing resource expenditure).
I don't see a reason not to show 20-40 year old ships - Akira, Saber, Steamruner, Prometheus, Nebula, even "hero" ships like Intrepid, Galaxy, Defiant, Soveerign, at least in the background (presumably they only had low resolution models). We saw plenty of Excelsior ships in TNG. By all means still have Riker in charge of the Zheng He (I assume they haven't decided what they want to do with the Enterprise), but just throw in some existing models in the background. I wish copy-and-paste didn't exist. Discovery did a great job in showing new ships off in S3.
Indeed, basically every show has done a great job at showing one thing: layers upon layers of designs from different fictional eras serving together. TNG did it because it had TOS movie models to recycle. DS9 added a bit of CGI from ST:FC to that. All the later shows were free to go overboard with all-new CGI, but deliberately chose to show layering, with DIS opening that way for the 2250s big fight (albeit with standardized nacelles for some reason) and then doing the very same for the 32nd century. LDS does layers, too, despite the medium again allowing for all-new ships at the exact same cost. That PIC didn't layer in that one scene is probably mostly an issue of this not being a carefully preruminated season opener, but rather a hasty rewrite calling for a fleet a short time before airing... Timo Saloniemi
Copy-paste is extremely useful function to have... I'd sooner be irked at people ABUSING it. It's actually really good for getting uniform details where they fit and having several copies of 1 starship... but a whole fleet of it with practically zero variability was pushing it... unless Starfleet went Borg-like in that period and just had a whole fleet of Zheng'he class of ships standing by to respond to Picard (which didn't seem likely). I can see SF having that many of the same class of ships (heck, probably A LOT more)... but likely not in the very same situation... most of them would be dispersed throughout the UFP and sent on exploratory missions. So, the fleet responding to Picard would probably contain several Zheng He class ships (with as you said, Riker still being in charge of the Zheng He itself as the flagship) and the rest would be ships we came to know. Even the fleet responding to Admiral Paris call to assemble at the TW aperture in VOY final episode contained 18 ships of multiple classes (with 9 more coming in).
It was only done because of budget and time constraints. Based on what we know, the big fleet was a last minute decision.
I found this on Facebook in a Trek Group. Hopefully this simplifies the whole "How Many Inquiry-class variants are seen in the season finale" debate. Apologies if someone else has already posted this earlier in the thread.
There actually look to be more subtle differences in the surface details than just simple nacelle and bussard color swaps. Interesting...
This does simplify things a lot and shows many of us were dead wrong about what we thought we saw as different or the same. There are some very big differences in surface detailing and things like nacelle length.
To be fair we didn't get such shots in the show. Still, a great find and beautiful details. I would say that this ship is my favorite of the Picard/TNG era, with the California a close second.