I thought them staying rogue would save a ton of money since you wouldn't have to keep showing all the extras on a starship and all the token San Francisco Earth stuff that Bennett was going to pile into act 1 on future films, that it would put that much more screen time to focus on the regulars instead of a bunch of ancillaries that have to talk to Kirk to get the Enterprise going again, and that they would be at last free of the Fed/SF dictates ...{snip}... so they could make tough decisions based on ethics rather than imposed-from-outside rules.
This is something I wish we could have seen as well. I think that had the post-TMP movies gone the direction of telemovies as originally planned, this would have been a very likely direction. Maybe after TWOK a series of films or miniseries would have been commissioned, with a new installment every 6-12 months. TWOK already set up some new characters to fill the void if either Nimoy or Shatner chose not to return (A real possibility given the limited budget available for telemovies). But once casting issues were ironed out, some story arcs could have been planned out ant implemented.
The problem with the feature films are they became more of an exhibition for the original cast than organically generated stories for the ship, crew and mission. The need to satisfy not only the fans pent up demand for more, but to varying degrees, each actor's demands and expectations for each character, caused the films to be created in a way to give a big 2-hour *kaboom* of adventure and character stuff ever 2-3 years. With competing egos and interests every film. Really, that we got any kind of story arc between TWOK-TSFS-TVH is extremely fortuitous. But the tone was all over the place, and as someone upthread mentioned, in order to make TSFS "work" for their purposes, they had to break it in editing so the sequence of events no longer made sense. Potential stories or plot threads that needed more than 2 hours to properly develop or go somewhere never had a in the films. But with telemovies, they could have taken some time to explore some of these better.
In some ways, this is not all that dissimilar from the fate of the Original Star Wars trilogy. At different times in the past, Lucas had talked about there being 9 movies and 12 movies. When Star Wars (ep 4) was first made, it was hoped to be moderately successful, but no one imagined it would become the smash success it did. Lucas's plan was to do a series of low to moderate budget films, and likely had rough ideas to do a series of several more. With Star Wars the success that it was, Lucas shifted gears and went for more high-budget blockbusters. From what I read, this was done in part to generate needed capital to launch his other film-production entities like ILM and Skywalker Sound. As such, films like ESB, and later ROTJ, became so massive and personally exhausting, that plot threads that at one time might have developed over several installments were instead quickly wrapped up in ROTJ. However much one accepts Lucas's claim that he had stories for all nine films written out, many of the threads seem to get wrapped up hastily in ROTJ, and don't quite match up to the creative vision at the time ANH or ESB were being made.
Although, as I said, I haven't seen the film in a while. I may have to rewatch it to see if I'm missing something, but it seems to me the movie is just a mess.
