There's a difference between not being consistent in a 55+ year franchise, and not being consistent on purpose.
The 'visual reboot' was done on purpose. Making a crewmember a descendant of Khan yet having people who served with this person not acknowledge this when they found Khan in Space Seed was done on purpose. Etc., etc.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. The showrunners are correct to say that things might be inconsistent with the story they are telling because the story is more important than being consistent with a 55 year old show. But then why do they need that 55 year old show as a crutch? Just say it's a reboot and be done with it.
Good point. Sometimes it seems to put the showrunners at odds with themselves. For instance, one of the goals of this episode of SNW was clearly to provide some background motivation to help explain Spock's otherwise highly unorthodox behavior in "Menagerie." (And I think it did that fairly well, actually.) But that's
only meaningful to viewers who are familiar with "Menagerie." And viewers familiar with "Menagerie" are exactly the
same people who are going to notice the logical discrepancy about when and why Pike handed over command. So the show's rationalizing one internal issue with TOS story logic only at the expense of creating a brand new one... giving with one hand and taking with the other, as far as those viewers go.
(Similar tensions apply to "Balance of Terror," of course, but at least not at a level that violates the story logic. Well, except for the part about Pike knowing in 2259 what Romulans look like, and not telling anyone...)
Trials and Tribbleations presumably broken canon given there were now DS9 folks in the fight and lineup. It was an explicit if unimportant change. It may not have mattered in the big picture but the Timecops certainly cared.
Quite the contrary. T&T was
impeccably respectful toward continuity. It bent over backwards to be. That doesn't mean it didn't change the timeline (in completely inconsequential ways designed to be amusing), but the timeline with which it interacted was
precisely the one fans were familiar with.
In-story timeline alterations are not the same as continuity violations. They're literally the exact opposite. Continuity violations are things that
can't be explained with story logic.
It's a 2022 TV show, so it's really different from a 1966 TV show. Nothing about that requires explanation, really; what would be bizarre would be a current TV series that matched up with something from half a century ago.
So long as it's in the service of telling a good story, I don't give a rat's ass about anything matching up to "canon" or some fictitious timeline. If Kirk becomes Pike's Number One in season two, then so be it.
I genuinely don't understand why people who don't give a damn about "canon" or continuity or even internal story logic feel the need to inject that view into discussions on those topics. If internal contradictions like the one that got this discussion going don't bother you, bully for you! Why not just leave that kind of conversation to the people who are actually interested in discussing such things? You're not going to convince anyone that the way they enjoy fiction is
wrong, for heaven's sake, nor that real-world explanations are a substitute for in-story explanations.
Personally one of the things I find compelling about the Star Trek universe is its singularity. Without that to keep me coming back and wanting to see how this universe I’m invested in is evolving, new shows would have to compete against the greatest shows currently on television to keep my attention.
Yes. Exactly. It's absurd anyone would even have to defend this. That's the whole reason shared universes
work... because (some) people like the sense of how each story fits into a larger tapestry.
(Hell, it's true even for "fictional universes" defined by a single author. For generations now people have devoted themselves to sorting out the continuity issues of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, for instance. It's a source of pleasure that contributes more satisfaction to (re)reading the stories. Why would anyone say that's a problem?)