I am a religious person (I only mention it because of Thrawn's statement as to his non-religiousity here - and so as to let other posters understand part of where I'm coming from).
So, for me, "Big Damn Heroes get stupid, random deaths" gets a different gut response from me, I suppose. My particular belief holds that the messiah died one of the most ignoble deaths imaginable. It was as tawdry as it gets.
And - again from my perspective - it does "suck" bigtime.
But it is part of my belief structure, it's part of my world view. So, I don't get all hung up about the why someone dies the way they do anymore. I've seen too much in my own life to even try to begin to understand why horrible, seemingly meaningless (from my perspective) things happen to good people.
In the fictional world we are looking at lots of different perspectives on these critical issues. But the issues are at heart always the same. Who made me? Why was I made? What am I meant to do with the time that I am given and who the hell gets to decide how much time I've been given in the first place?...and what happens to me when I die?
For me, the joy of Startrek is the sheer number of of potentially valid and certainly challenging philosophical viewpoints that the all the tv series', movies and books keep producing - from so many angles - that address these universal questions.
I love that, and it's what keeps me coming back for more.
