I think someone decided that television audiences in 2022 would be smart enough to pick up that Ben is in the past and the rest of the cast isn't, based enough on set and costume choices for the average episode.
It's got nothing to do with intelligence. Heck,
Quantum Leap was part of the first wave of SFTV shows in the late '80s that
did respect the viewers' intelligence for a change, along with ST:TNG and
Alien Nation. (There were a few earlier ones, like the
Twilight Zone reboot,
Starman, and
Max Headroom, but the '80s were the decade of
Automan and
Manimal, and the smart shows were the exception. It was in the late '80s that genre TV began to mature into the smarter, more sophisticated form we know today.)
It's just that Donald Bellisario wanted the project to be in the near future, while the makers of the new show want it to be in the present. It's unnecessary to try to invent some explanation for why one is better than the other, and utterly counterfactual and silly to argue that it's some kind of generation change, given that both approaches have always coexisted.
I would speculate that the difference is one of viewpoint and format. In the original show, Sam was usually the only viewpoint character and the Project's present was rarely seen, only talked about; so the Project was almost always in the future from the audience's perspective. But in the new show, the Project is a regular presence and the majority of the cast's material takes place there exclusively, so that makes it part of the viewpoint characters' present. So each choice makes more narrative or at least symbolic sense for its respective show. Not to mention logistical sense; when the Project was only glimpsed a handful of times in multiple seasons, you could afford to dress it up with some fancy lights and gadgets and arrange for futuristic locations; but when it's seen every week, it's more practical and cost-efficient to use a present-day setting.
And let's not forget that we got seventeen seasons of Stargate TV shows which had government facilities, alien cities, and intergalactic wars happening right under our noses, and the average Joe Citizen never knew about it.
I'm never a fan of the secrecy trope, because it's only done as an excuse to pretend a fantasy/SF show is taking place behind the scenes of "the real world," but of course we know it isn't because we're watching the damn thing on TV, so it seems a silly and pointless pretense. And it squanders the true potential of science fiction, which is to explore how scientific and technological progress
changes society and humanity's view of the world, something you can't do if humanity as a whole is unaware of the progress.
But in the case of later
Stargate, the secrecy just started to feel like force of habit rather than something that served a narrative purpose. By then, you had Earth as a major interstellar power, all the major governments were in the loop, countless scientists and prominent businesspeople were in the loop -- the secrecy just got in the way of the stories by that point. It got ridiculous after a while, and morally indefensible -- don't the people have a right to know that wars are being waged in their name? Don't they have a right to have a say in the policies Earth applies in its interstellar relations? Not to mention the potential benefits of making alien technology available -- for instance, those blue-light stun guns they had (intars, I think they were called?) would've saved a lot of lives if they'd become regular police issue.
Of course, they got a great episode out of the debate, namely "Heroes." But I was firmly on the side of Saul Rubinek's character there. He was right that it should have been made public. The secrecy just got more useless after that.
).
