Remember that the time between Generations and Nemesis is just as great as the time between Encounter at Farpoint and All Good Things. So Data, and the situation with his chip, might have evolved further in that time.
If you can call it an evolution. It looks like he's back to his old tricks. And B4 has to be the dumbest android ever!!! That explains what happened to him later. What else would you do with something that can't understand the simplest of things?
Good points both, and I didn't pick up on the allusion of the situation being temporary until you mentioned it. Data is still more technological than biological... but one way or another, there is always justification for the CMO and the CE to work in tandem -- Data was said to have biochemical 'nutrients' that act as blood, so there could easily be times where overlap was plausible and possible. One doesn't want leaking fluids in Engineering to begin with, so Sickbay would be a better place to patch up a leaky hose. (I'll ride along with the notion the nutrients getting clobbered by the Naked Now virus could make him act all ditzy drunk too... it's not a great analogy, but I've seen far worse and entirely implausible ones made in other shows. But if positronics is like electronics, except a positron is used instead of an electron... then noting the mass of a positron is identical to that of an electron, but has an opposite charge, and yet there's no such thing as positronics even today - yet electronics had been discovered and developed a small handful of decades earlier... so if positronics allows for neat things electronics can't, what has held such a concept back? (What would make overcoming hurdles in preventing positronics from becoming a reality. Like the explosive nature of positrons is in our universe the same way we don't want antimatter to come on down because the price ain't right...) As for "positronics" itself, that's homage to Asimov who coined the term.
I think my favorite "Data evolution" is from the non canon autobiography of Captain Picard. It's revealed that before his demise in Nemesis, Data downloaded his memories into B4, whose primitive positron brain couldn't handle them. But later on, Q showed up: he states that he's not "doing this" for Picard, but for Data, because he "misses him". One snap of Q's legendary digits, and Data is restored.
Actually, "positronic" doesn't refer to a current of positrons, as positrons are antimatter and couldn't exist in the presence of matter, at least for no longer than a very small fraction of a second. "Positronic" is about the way the brain is made (by bombarding platinum with positrons) so a positronic brain will not emit any positrons (which as I said wouldn't be very believable as antimatter can only exist for any length of time if it's contained in a forcefield., a magnetic forcefield).
That's pretty grim, but initiating a plot like that would've been a better avenue than what was done in "Nemesis". I would've preferred what was done for Data in "All Good Things..." where he was a professor and was an intellectual and had a sense of acceptance of who he is. For me, it was a wonderful glimpse at how that character could grow; plus with what was seen throughout TNG about the chip I suspected it would've been the "Holy Grail" for Data to finally earn it and become something more complex and interesting. Not a f*cking buffoon or an ass clown presented in the movies, it was such a disappointment for Rick Berman to throw away what was developed for the character on TNG just to appease the boredom of his alleged superstar Brent Spiner.
I heard that one proviso for Brent Spiner to even be in "Nemesis" was that Data was killed. So that wasn't a writer's fault, it was Spiner's... What I don't get is that they sort of resuscitated Data in the dimwitted form of B4... Spoiler: Picard spoiler alert, beware!! Plus Spiner agreed to play Data in a dreamed form in "Picard", so maybe he changed his mind after all these years.
They had half of an idea to do a “search for data” last movie, but kinda dropped it even before release. he initially didn’t want to do it, but got convinced that the CGI was good enough to pull it off and the fans would want it.
That garbage done on PICARD was a waste of time because that entity was NOT Data. Data was destroyed in Nemesis and whatever came from B4 could be a malfunction from the B4 design, mold and internal database. Remnants of a crappy version, a prototype, of Dr. Soong's creation.
Data’s memories were transferred into B4, so in a way it would have been data if he had come from B4. But instead they rebuilt Data’s essence starting from a neuron salvaged “somehow”...as if you could rebuild a car from a piece of the dashboard alone!
which is really baffling: they had a perfectly fine mean of bringing him back that was intentionally put in place twenty years ago and...they came up with utter nonsense even them failed to keep straight?! Why?!
What could possibly be rendered through a damaged computer? I would think there would be flaws in the transfer. Because the producers are creatively bankrupt... this includes the actor Brent Spiner who seem to can't go away from Star Trek.