Everyone's like "it's just visuals" when it's not. Attitudes are incompatible.
This is true in certain areas -- and it's also a good thing.
The thing that ages TOS is the most, you see, is not the visual effects or the film grade or the aesthetics. It's the misogyny that permeates the whole thing from beginning to end -- from Vina believing it's better to live a life in illusory exile because she's ugly (as though women have no value in human society if they're not attractive to men) in "The Cage," to the casual declaration that a woman could never command a starship in "Turnabout Intruder," and every casually sexist remark ("Women are more easily frightened," "Vulcan is the only planet who can say its women are logical" etc) and sexist portrayal of women as irrational or in need of male guidance and protection ("Captain, I'm frightened!") in between.
So, yes, the general social attitudes in DIS aren't totally consistent with those of TOS. DIS's more feminist storytelling reflects real-world cultural evolution away from misogyny. It is a discontinuity, true. And that's a good thing.
Technology has been altered, and retconned into earlier periods of Trek which makes various older episodes nonsensical.
This is true, and I wish they hadn't done that. But ST has done that plenty of times before -- how many androids did they run into on TOS but then we're told no one's ever seen anything like Data? How many times have intestellar transporters magically worked for one episode and then never again? How much advanced alien tech was discovered that could have revolutionized Federation science but then ignored? The Federation literally figures out how to bring the dead back to life in ST3 but then never again? They can travel to the edge of the galaxy and back in a couple of days in TOS and to the center of the galaxy and back in a couple of hours in ST5 but
Voyager is gonna take 70 years to get home? The Genesis Device is huge for two movies and then ignored forever? How many times have we seen the canon go back and forth on whether or not cloaking devices are impenetrable? He'll, we already saw cloaking devices used in ENT when TOS established no one had ever seen one before.
Bottom line: wildly inconsistent depictions of technological evolutions is nothing new to ST and DIS is not special for it.
No, they are not.
Jumping on the extreme end of the bandwagon does not make it so.
They CAN be violations of an author's copyright under certain conditions, but their simple existence doesn't make it so. Fair Use is extremely important in such discussions.
Fair Use requires a transformative element -- e.g., it's Fair Use to edit in a clip from a copyrighted movie in a video essay because the clip is being used to illustrate an argument, not to merely reproduce the copyrighted work. Or it's Fair Use to do a parody called Captain Quirk of the starship
Enterforaprize because the effect is to mock (and implicitly make an argument about) the original work. Merely writing a new story with someone else's intellectual property is not Fair Use.
To put it another way, do you think that large forums like this, or, say Reddit, who have owners that have to think seriously about that kind of thing, a lot more than you, I suspect, would have fan fiction sections if yours and that other poster's opinion were anything close to fact?
Dude, Reddit had an entire forum dedicated to posting pictures of underage girls as long as they weren't naked, and it took Anderson fuckin Cooper yelling at them about it on national television for several days in a row before they bothered banning it. Hell, YouTube's entire business model relies on people violating copyright law and then them going in and enforcing a copyright claim just enough times that I.P. owners decide not to bother to sue. So, no, I do not think that such companies are terribly afraid of violating the law.
I.P. owners have generally made it clear that they'll tolerate fan fic as long as they don't think it threatens their income. But being
de facto legal is not the same thing as being
de jure legal. And if CBS ever decides fan fic threatens their income, they'll go after sites that publish fan fic just as surely as they went after Axanar.
There are other factors, but it primarily comes down to fair use. As someone who has written some fan fiction, ran a fan 3d rp production for star trek, etc, I take it pretty seriously when someone decides to call me a criminal.
I've written and published fan fic too. It's still technically illegal.
Fair Use is parody or reproducing excerpts as needed to support a scholarly analysis. Fan films, fanfic, fan manuals practically never fall into those categories, so they have merely been tolerated on a case-by-case basis.
This.