How does JJ Abram's personally relate to the Star Trek characters?

[GhostFaceSaint]

From Entertainment Weekly.

JJ Abrams, an EW Entertainer of the Decade, on 'Star Trek', 'Lost', and his collaborators by Jeff Jensen
[...]
2009 was a peak year for the 43-year-old Abrams thanks to Star Trek, a global box-office smash that revitalized a lagging pop culture franchise. Abrams — an unabashed Star Wars guy — had been a Trek shrugger himself, but fell in love with the world the more he worked on it.

“I didn’t feel like I could relate to any of the characters,” Abrams tells EW. “I didn’t feel cocky or self-confident like Kirk. I wasn’t as logical or rule abiding as Spock. I wasn’t grumpy as Bones or as wide eyed as Chekov. I didn’t have the intelligence of Scotty or the reliability of Sulu. I knew I wasn’t Uhura. I was none of these characters. Looking at the whole group, they were all wonderful archetypes, but I didn’t feel a bond with any of them. But working on the movie I fell in love with all of them. The torment of Spock. The full-of-potential-but-unrealized Kirk. The strength of Uhura, the wit of Scotty, the bravery of Sulu, the innocence of Chekov — I loved them all. It took working on it for a long time to not just love them, but become them.”

[...]

I thought everyone would appreciate this quote from the EW article which if you want to read the whole original interview it can be found here.

So is JJ's experience with Trek in coming to relate to it really that different from some of the Trekkies and fans?

 

[Vigilance]

I agree with pretty much all his character takes except Kirk.

I love the way the movie represented Kirk, but I can never think of Kirk as "unrealized potential", because I met him at a different place his character arc.

First time I watched Trek, I was like 8 and Kirk was 30 something, and he always struck me as the man, that guy who always knew what to do and his shit together.

Abrams got to know a different Kirk, which is cool but I can never see Kirk that way.