This is a good point. It will depend greatly on what value individual fans put weight on.The mental gymnastics for DSC are mostly story based, in-universe (classifying everything because of Control). Kludgy, but it is what it is. Visual differences are almost always due to out-of-universe production issues and it’s wrong to assign in-universe explanations (separate timelines, whatever) to these external things
Visuals are less concerning to me but that's me.