I pretty much agree with everything you said. To me however, there's a huge difference between not having things in a 50+ year franchise perfectly match up continuity-wise, and purposely changing things so much that your new stuff looks and feels nothing like the source material. At that point it's debatable whether your show is still part of the larger established universe, or it's its own thing. I think the problem arises when the producers of that new show still feel the need to use the old show as a crutch because they don't have enough faith that their show will be able to stand on its own, so they are afraid to go the 'reboot' route because they are worried that people won't watch it unless it's tied to the previous iteration. Ron Moore didn't seem to have that problem when he created nuBSG. JJ Abrams didn't seem to have that problem when he created the Kelvin Timeline (although there still was a connection to the prime universe with Spock & Nero, but that was peripheral to the larger story.)
I agree with this 100%
The arguments over this flows from the insistence of the producers, studio PR department, and some fans that it all fits together, when it's obvious it doesn't.
And it's ok if it doesn't!! If
Discovery,
Strange New Worlds, or any of the Paramount+ era shows just said they're their own thing, it would still be
Star Trek, it would still use the basic elements, and it would still base itself off the original and even the characters we all knew, but it would be so freeing for those shows. They would be able to go in any direction they liked and present their own visions, similar to the
Battlestar Galactica model, where Ron Moore's show was its own thing. It could exist and the original exists. And people accepted it.
Instead, we have these arguments that border on gaslighting where people want to argue to the ends of the Earth that it's all the same and all still fits, when SNW's Gorn isn't the TOS Gorn, and the new Canadian version of Khan can't be the same version of Khan that appears in TOS. It's different. And it would be so much better if everyone involved would just accept that, since when you want to argue it all fits together that invites people to judge it on how well it fits.
Probably because, most of the time, the reason someone says that is to invalidate a series that has a good number of fans, such as Lower Decks or Discovery. There's nothing inherently insulting about saying "Everything is included". There is something insulting about saying "The show you like isn't good enough to be part of everything else."
But it's not insulting to say that the old stuff that everyone knew and liked for decades isn't good enough to be acknowledged now, so that's why we gotta pretend the new version is how it always existed?
