No, Roddenberry was just a sexist piece of crap pure and simple, from most accounts and based on a goodly portion of what he wrote.
Of course he was, but that's not the point. The point is that if even creators see their own creations as imperfect and don't require their audiences to be slavisly literal about every detail, then there's no reason why audiences should require
themselves to be slavishly literal about every detail. We're allowed to acknowledge things as mistakes and just ignore them, to pretend there's a "truer" Platonic reality underneath that doesn't include those mistakes.
I know I've made mistakes in some of my published works and made sure to cut them out of later collected versions. Most other writers do the same when they get the chance. We all make mistakes, but we have a right to correct them, put them behind us, and try to do better.
Fair enough, but, unless you're going to George Lucas it (or spend forever tinkering with it and never finishing), there reaches a point where you have to let it go and let it be what it is.
But "what it is," in the case of a long-running franchise, is a loose agglomeration of works from multiple different artists attempting their own respective approximations of the same underlying idea. If six painters do a portrait of the same model, every single one will look different, but that doesn't mean the model is different. It just means that the same idea is filtered through different artists' interpretations. John Romita, Jr.'s Peter Parker doesn't look like his father's Peter Parker, but the difference is in the artists, not the character. So if DSC's Pike isn't exactly identical to "The Cage"'s Pike, if DSC's writing is less sexist than TOS's writing, that doesn't mean they're in different universes, it just means they're different writers' interpretations of the same characters and world.
We as viewers do not "have to" do anything. We are not employees of the creators; we are their customers. So we don't "have to" accept every last element of the works they provide for our entertainment. We have the right to critique them, to challenge them, to revise them in our minds.
I guess, although there is a fine line between allegory and applicability, to borrow from JRR Tolkien. I mean, one could interpret ENT as being set in the antimatter universe, not the prime one (or DSC not being canon or set in the prime universe, either), but there still the fact that those shows were not intended to be interpreted in that manner. Not sure if that makes any sense, but there it is,
That actually makes my point.
Discovery is not intended to be interpreted as an alternate reality from TOS. It's intended to be the same reality, but its portrayal of that reality is filtered through more modern sensibilities and techniques. Mistaking that for separate realities is confusing the technique of the artist with the nature of the subject.[/QUOTE]