Ignoring continuity unless there's a good reason for it is just plain laziness. The Trek XI writers are being paid rather well, I assume. Make em work for their paycheck!
Just to go back to arguing about ENT, because it's so much fun:
Seasons 1 & 2: The crew naively explores without any agenda other than to seek out new life. They're hypnotized by Roddenberry's ideals so that they're blind to the Vulcan's perhaps over-compensatory pragmatism and skepticism.
Season 3: They get a tangible mission in which they must save Earth and their future.
Season 4: They come home heroes and Enterprise and crew serve, collectively, as political representatives, negotiators, and diplomats.
Were there further Seasons then we would have seen the beginning of the Romulan War and stuff.
Even though the first few seasons weren't executed in the best possible manner I think they really needed them, because it does show the arc progress.
I had an issue with the "naively exploring" part. Why would anyone on Earth fund random exploration? This is presumably before the no-money commie economy of Earth, since we were told Earth was still recovering from the disasters of the past. That contradicts the notion that anyone would be willing to pay for directionless exploration (leaving aside the issue that real scientists wouldn't spend 2 days tops on an alien world - they'd set up a research station and spend their whole lives there. Archer wasn't an explorer, he was a tourist).
The "Roddenberry ideals" were the Federation's ideals, and it worked because the Federation was powerful and therefore needed checks like the Prime Directive. And Archer didn't even follow these ideals. He barged around, acting like he owned the galaxy and showing little awareness of the huge risk that he could get Earth embroiled in a war with a far more powerful society due pissing off the wrong people.
Earth's problem was not that it was more powerful than everyone else, but that it was far weaker than its neighbors, and a lot of them were very aggressive neighbors, too. ENT should have been about Earth simply surviving this scenario, and ramping up quickly to put itself in a safer position.
Having a couple seasons of setup before launching into the Federation-building/Romulan War part of the story is a good idea. But why not actually make use of the idea that we're not in the enlightened 23rd or 24th C, but in the less enlightened 22nd, when people are still profit-motivated, Earth doesn't have infinite resources from some magical source that would underpin the idealized commie economy (there were still aspects of capitalism in TOS; it wasn't till TNG that these were expunged), humans are still bigoted and squabbling, and Starfleet is more military than even Kirk's time?
Almost all exploration in human history has been motivated by money. I see no reason why this should abruptly, magically change. We need to see the transition phase, and the 22nd C is a good place to see it happen. Archer & the gang should have been exploring to make important diplomatic, military and above all, trading contacts for poor little weak Earth - a society just taking the first tenuous steps into real space travel and at a serious disadvantage but also not being able to afford to wait till trouble came knocking on its door.
Archer's mission would have invariably embroiled him in interstellar politics, without him having to be stupid or naive to make it happen, and lead naturally to the Federation-building part of the story and giving the 22nd C a distinct character rather than what it turned out to be, a boring rehash of the 24th.
