@M: Thanks! Well, there's a fine line between reproducing what we saw on screen exactly as it was (aka, as a TV set) and reproducing how it should've looked if the things we were told were screens were actual screens. I mostly try to stay true to the sets, but also to keep in mind the intention, how it would 'really' look like. I might add a little Fresnel effect on the panels to simulate it a bit, but I definitively won't go as far as to add the clear light fixtures behind the plexiglas, because I don't treat it as plexiglas, I treat it as a screen. I actually like the image you modified, and it looks more realistic as a photo of a set, but I'm not going for that.
However, after hearing (well, reading) both your comment and
@JoeRalat's earlier comment, I went down a rabbit hole and ended up changing everything, but in a different way.
TL;DR: A lot of materials and lighting changes on Blender, everything looks far more realistic now.
One of the disadvantages of being self taught is that sometimes I miss something that for everybody else in the industry is very obvious. In this case, I wasn't using Fresnel (aka how light bounces off stuff at a higher intensity when seen at a shallow angle) on my materials, and just when I was about to just add it in, I read that the next version of Blender will include a new type of material called principled material. These new materials not only automatically include Fresnel calculations in them, but also are PBR (physically based rendering) materials. In layman terms they behave a lot more realistically on any environment without having to 'cheat' by adding lights or stuff like that.
Anyway, this new material (which funnily enough was developed by Disney for Wreck it Ralph, and then added to Blender by community members) is already available in the test branch of Blender, so I moved over to that. I changed all my non emitting materials to principled, and everything is nicer now.
But wait, there's more! The new version of Blender also adds some denoising filters for low resolution renders (the type I use for my 'in progress' shots), making them look a more clear and better lit. This won't affect my final renders as they have a lot more render samples and already look crisp without any cheating filter, but for the everyday render, it's an amazing addition.
And I also came across a new color management encoder which drastically increases the dynamic range of the renders, making for far more realistic illumination without burning out objects near the light source.
So, a lot of changes, here's a before shot on Blender 2.78:
And here's the same shot on the 2.79 test build:
As you can see, object materials now look a lot more realistic, as can be seen most notably on the reflections added on the Conn/Ops stations and the captain's consoles, as well as on the fabric of the chairs. I had to tweak every single light source and I'll keep experimenting with the new material type but I'm pretty happy with the result so far.
What do you guys think? Does it look better to you as well, or is it just my delusional mind after spending 4 hours tweaking values on material nodes?