No, it isn't counter-intuitive, but it isn't common in my experience and reading. Certainly not enough for me to consider it the "majority" view.
Might not be. Like I said, we don't really have the data to know. I was just trying to rebut MM's blanket assertion that the
opposite was the majority view. (Truth be told, I suspect plenty of fans have legitimately never thought about it one way or the other.)
Majority opinion isn't really the critical point here, though. After all, this whole thread is about how to maintain continuity... how to determine what does and doesn't fit into the "Prime Timeline." It's helpful to have rules of construction for that sort of thing, in the same way that courts have rules of construction for how to interpret the law. For instance: if you have two different statutes, both passed by the legislature at some point and signed into law, that contradict each other if read one way, and can be made congruent if read another way, a court is inclined to prefer the second way. It just makes sense to
let things make sense, rather than forcing a conflict.
In the case at hand, there's a line of dialogue that has two possible readings, both of which work within the episode, but only one of which is compatible with the show's long-term themes and other aspects of canon. It seems only logical to prefer that reading.
Moreover... even if the "no women captains" reading were unequivocal, it would still be a poor example of what MM was trying to claim about how retcons work. First of all, as I've noted, that would make it an instance in which later stories (e.g., in ENT)
directly contradicted an earlier point of continuity, not merely "ignored" it in the way ENT's Augment story has thus far been ignored by DSC. Second, we're still talking about just one line of dialogue (from an unreliable source, at that), so even if it
were contradicted by a retcon and hence superseded, the rest of "Enterprise Incident" and indeed all of TOS would remain intact... whereas the implications of MM's argument would be to completely wipe away an
entire two-episode story. (And, moreover, a story that helps make sense of
other continuity far more than it hinders it.) There's no rule of construction that makes sense of that.
