Exactly. People pooh-pooh windows as if it's some archaic technology. In reality it can be quite useful, and doubly so in Trek reality.
OK, so in my head-canon, the new bridge windows now have some form of ablative armor that pops out over the area instead of sliding in place like a sash.
Introducing new designs and retiring old ones are not necessarily the same thing though. Fine with Starfleet coming out with new designs and expanding the fleet – less fine with them going all Logan's Run on established ships that have proven themselves the moment they reach double digits.
I draw the line at Picard sending Geordi to look out of an Enterprise window at things because his VISOR is apparently better than the entire sensor suite of a Galaxy-class ship though...
Yeah, that was odd. I think early on the production wanted to reinforce Geordi’s VISOR was superior to regular eyesight (for folks who had maybe missed the premiere) and that was just one way they could demonstrate it.
In my head canon the Dominion War had a huge effect on ship longevity. The ships that survived, especially prewar builds could potentially have suffered multiple large damage events. Repaired and fit for service but retired once decent replacements were available. You also tend to have large technological advances during war time that some frames possibility couldn’t handle. So while the Galaxy or Intrepid may have been present in Nemesis they might have been “good enough” while the fleet was rebuilding. There was also a large loss of trained personnel and you probably had a lot leave service after the war ended. Reallocating personnel to new builds makes sense.
Yeah, they key point is that 100 year service life for the Enterprise-D included regular refits and upgrades. Without those upgrades it might still work and do its job, but it'll be hopelessly outmatched by rival starships. There probably comes a point where it's no longer worth upgrading an existing ship to keep it running, and it either gets mothballed or scrapped. Possibly with advances in replication etc, it's now easier to build a new ship and reuse/recycle components from an old one than it is to keep the old one up to date. That seems to have been the case with the Titans, and possibly the Enterprise-E.
Who said they were? It may just be a case of a shipbuilding policy by a society that can afford to do such a thing. Long-lived designs like the Oberth-, Miranda-, and Excelsior-classes may have been far more the exception than the rule and may even now have been a result of a bygone era. Starfleet updates a few of their designs, but it seems more common just to incorporate system improvements with new designs simply because they can, and 20-25 years for a single ship isn't that big of a deal to them. Conversely, Klingon shipbuilding policy could be the total opposite and is based on keeping ships around as long as possible. In the "All Good Things..." future timeline, the Enterprise-D was going to be decommissioned after less than 25 years of service until Admiral Riker intervened. So even if a ship is intended to last 100 years, it may fall far short of that depending on how much wear & tear it's actually subjected to during its operational lifetime. I know some may call it wasteful, but if you can swing it, do it, IMO.
We're also just seeing top of the line military Starships most of the time. In the civilian world we frequently see old ships flying around - Kasidy Yates' freighter has TOS-era graphics for example, and there were plenty of others in the TNG era with the old movie style blue/green LCARS.
There was nothing about the Intrepid that screamed ‘evil ship’ to me. Definitely not like the Vengeance. The Intrepid doesn’t even look all that different from the Titan. Now with that said, I do think they squandered the idea of having the other ship look more menacing.