As far as restoring the original timeline, it's still there, intact. Arguably, there are two "original timelines" as The Prime Universe is continuing through Star Trek: Online and the Pocket novels (I understand some are trying to combine them into one continuity, but there are some conflicting events).
The Pocket novels, ST:O, and IDW Comics have all continued to tell stories set in the Prime continuity, but are not keeping consistent with each other in their interpretation of the Prime continuity. It's worth keeping in mind the difference between an in-story alternate reality and a real-life differing interpretation of a work of fiction. If canon is "history," tie-ins are more like historical fiction; they're things that
could have happened in the context of the history we know but didn't necessarily happen, and different works of "historical fiction" can be equally compatible with history but inconsistent with each other.
There's no need for a "restoration" in the Abrams movies. That's misunderstanding the storytelling purpose for which time travel was used in this case. We're used to seeing it utilized as a trope in individual episodes of an ongoing series where its purpose was merely to create a short-term problem for the heroes to resolve, restoring the status quo by the end of the story as per the usual structure of series fiction. But it served an entirely different purpose here: namely, to allow the filmmakers to start fresh and be free to tell a version of
Star Trek unencumbered by past continuity, while still presenting it as an offshoot of the original reality rather than a completely unrelated thing. The time change is not a temporary problem to be resolved, it's the origin of the creators' desired status quo, an open-ended version of the TOS era that leaves them free to tell whatever stories they want.
The same thing happened in the TV series
Eureka. At the start of their fourth season, they did a time-travel story that altered history, not as a temporary problem to be solved, but as a way to revamp the series and give themselves a new, permanent status quo that would open up new story possibilities and free them from some of the problems and limitations the previous state of affairs imposed. And it worked beautifully; the show was better, fresher, and more interesting after the change.
Ditto for all the times DC Comics has used time travel and reality-shaking "Crises" to reboot its continuity, from
Crisis on Infinite Earths through
Flashpoint. The intention is always for the new timeline to be permanent and allow a fresh start for the storytelling, free of past continuity baggage. Of course, later creators motivated by nostalgia eventually come in and bring back new versions of ideas from the old continuity, but the timeline change is never simply undone with everything restored exactly to the way it had been.
So time travel doesn't always serve the same story purpose. Sometimes it's a problem for the characters to solve, but sometimes it's the solution to the writers' problems. And in the latter case, it doesn't get reversed. It's not supposed to.
finally. I'm curious to hear what everyone else thinks....
