Replying to myself here to correct myself. I've now had the time to complete my exhaustive review of turbolift scenes over the three seasons for my lift model project. I've cataloged 382 instances of a lift being entered, exited, ridden, or walked near. The data revealed some interesting surprises, and also showed me that all along I have been misinterpreting the blue-floor situation.
The carpet in the turbolift cabs — the actual turbolift cabs — has been green every single time, comprising 231 out of 234 instances where carpet color was observable. The other three observations, the blue ones, were all cases of what I call Turbolift D or the "dummy" lift. I know this has been discussed before, but I'll go into a little more detail for anyone joining this telecast in progress (and I needed to write this up anyway for my project notes).
In what I call position D, they faked a turbolift a few times by replacing the rec room's yellow side doors with red ones, with the camera placed approximately as shown so we couldn't see much of the rec room interior. Those three instances of blue carpet are simply the rec room floor.
The dummy lift makes an appearance in six scenes across three episodes, which were all filmed pretty close together. The Paramount+ timestamps are provided below. Three times they were just background doors implying a lift, and three other times a character taking a cab emerged from them after a camera cut.
| episode | Pplus | time | characters | lift | mode | floor |
| 3x13 Wink of an Eye | s3e11 | 08:15 | Kirk | D | exit | blue |
| 3x15 Let That Be Your Last Battlefield | s3e15 | 20:50 | Lokai sickbay | D | walkby | |
| 3x15 Let That Be Your Last Battlefield | s3e15 | 46:18 | Lokai chase | D | exit | blue |
| 3x15 Let That Be Your Last Battlefield | s3e15 | 46:30 | Bele chase | D | exit | blue |
| 3x17 The Mark of Gideon | s3e16 | 01:53 | Kirk | D | walkby | |
| 3x17 The Mark of Gideon | s3e16 | 04:27 | Kirk | D | walkby |
FWIW, in rarely used lift positions like "D," I generally only consider a pair of red doors to represent a turbolift if some evidence thereof is shown somewhere in the same episode. This will be (a) the revelation of a lift interior behind the doors, (b) characters interacting with the doors in a manner consistent with a lift (i.e., entering or exiting them as part of a cab ride), or (c) a single-height black placque above the doorway. Thus, I consider the red doors barely glimpsed during Lokai's escape from sickbay at 20:50 to be a turbolift, because later in that same episode he, and then Bele, are each seen exiting those doors at the ends of their separate cab rides. (For double red doors in commonly occurring lift positions like "T1" on my plan above, I count them as lifts except when there is evidence to the contrary, such as a side-mounted room placque.)
So anyway, in the earlier debate my point about the carpet was trash, so to set the record straight I thought I should point out that with this research I refuted myself on the rug argument.
Back then I even said, inexplicably, that the dummy turbolift had the right carpet color. That's just wrong! The dummy lift is the entire explanation for the color conflict. All "real" turbolift cabs — the ones that have filmable interiors — have green carpet.
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