DIS writers already made it pretty clear through Book's expository lines that this isn't so: most if not all of the alternate methods are actually woefully inferior, being too expensive or risky or relying on resources that are even more difficult to come by than dilithium, if not all three at the same time. They look good on paper, or when introduced - but stormtroopers looked scary for the first three minutes of Star Wars, too...
And this is pretty consistent, since if those alternate methods actually were worth the while, everybody else would have been using them already, back when primitive humans and their vassals were toying with silly dilithium. We have yet to learn of a star empire that would not rely on dilithium, though. (No, we never learned that the Dominion would rely on it, but we never learned otherwise, either.)
Spore power is fine as long as you don't destroy the multiverse with it. But nobody knows of spore power, presumably because it's in everybody's interest to keep close watch over those who dabble in it, and to eliminate everybody who gets too close to that multiverse-terminating thing.
Timo Saloniemi
