If you're now seriously suggesting that I was actually calling you a fanatic about sandwiches then I can only guess that you're not reading what I'm actually saying.
You were comparing me to “legacy hating fans”. “Hating” is too strong a word for having an opinion that the franchise should be mostly X and rarely Y, and as noted earlier, I don’t have a problem with legacy, merely its constant reinterpretation for a new day and age in a way that could eventually cement the 23rd century as the baseline era for
Star Trek and establish certain must-have elements that detract from new characters and concepts.
Had no emotions (except when he clearly did for plot reasons) and suppressed emotions (except when he couldn't for plot reasons) are functionally the same thing. And it is still not in any way a step forward. It's a step sideways.
Suppressed emotions vs a lack of emotions is not functionally the same to Spock and Data. The viewer knows that Spock feels underneath even as Nimoy is maintaining the usual veneer. It informs our reactions to scenes with his mother and father. Data experiences stimuli and absence thereof, not to mention that his character sees greater growth over the 178 episodes because of Piller’s focus on the primary, ensemble cast.
Data was a bridge between logic and emotion and between technology and humanity. He was the Borg before they did the Borg and he was Spock as reinterpreted for the cyberpunk era.
Data was firmly oriented towards humanity and perceived his origins as limitations to be gladly overcome. His superior abilities would be acknowledged as useful but treated as secondary on his journey to become more human. The Borg, on the other hand, use technology to achieve their vision of perfection, treating their organic and non-organic components merely as complementary means to that end. Spock would remain conflicted until late in life when he achieved a kind of serenity and acceptance. And if Data feels derivative, then what about Burnham as yet another never-discussed influence in Spock’s childhood whose particular twist is that she is a human raised by Vulcans to downplay her emotions?
These characters are both similar and different the way people or societies have similarities and differences, and the idea behind deemphasizing legacy is to give new characters time to grow, rather than detract from that with even half a season spent on Spock’s childhood and Spock having a connection to the ”red angel”. I mean Airiam died in the same episode that tried to examine her character, despite definite attempts in S2 to give the crew more to do.
Also, the Maquis and Worf were tweaked and adjusted just like The Cage was. The only reason O'Brien escaped such things is because he was barely a character on TNG. What DS9 did was the same as what DSC does. Both resulted in discrepancies with earlier shows. Both gave plenty of questionable 'canon' for anyone inclined to obsess over such things. Both did what they thought was best for the story they were telling over the stories that had already been told. Thats what all writers do, in the end, and it's not a bad thing in any way.
TNG wasn’t tweaked to this degree because there was no need to update the show for DS9 viewers, and the fan-serving aspect wasn’t as great because O’Brien hadn’t really been developed as you note and Worf was immediately integrated into the new dynamic, aside from the fact that he hadn’t achieved a comparable status in pop culture. Any inconsistencies one might think of aren’t such that they would disrupt a sense of immersion, the way the
Enterprise was reimagined rather than reverently interpolated as before, and then we also have the differences in tone designed to bring these 2250s closer to something that seems like it could be our future, not just one where everything evolved differently after the 1960s. DS9 was still going forward into an unknown future; DSC spent two seasons wedging itself into an established timeline, then slapped on a band-aid even though a lot of the story points could’ve been rationalized away. Let’s see what it does next.
They chose to make a new ship with new characters and develop those new characters alongside a small handful of returning characters.
Very likely because Kirk’s crew at that point would’ve been reserved by the
Kelvin Timeline; how else should we view a main character whose backstory seemed
that artificially designed to provide a substitute for Spock? Later, of course, with ST4 being called into question, the producers may have felt greater freedom to include other characters also. But still the legacy characters take away precious time in the short seasons from Burnham, Culber, Saru, Stamets, Tilly. Instead, let’s see a bit of Mudd. Let’s see where the Mirror Universe is at. What’s the status of that war with the Klingons, who
have to be Klingons only reimagined yet again? Now, how about Spock’s childhood? Some of this, more of that, with incoming characters given little time to just show us something of their off-duty life or personal experiences that do not involve the galaxy.
It's also rather ridiculous to claim that season two only used her to explore Spock when half her story in that season was about her biological mother.
Her mother was revealed only at the very end; before that the season was very much about Spock and the mysterious “red angel”, who could have been anyone at that point.
