I’m not sure what that has to do with choosing to not answer my question when everyone else answered it just fine.
There's a difference between DS9 and ENT doing a celebration (fanservice) episode in the TOS era where the entire crew (or mirror crew) makes jokes about how different things are and having a new series presented with the same look but without the internal humor. Similarly, TOS had reference to the 1990s Eugenics war. If they made a new show about Khan's rise in the 1980s and global war in the 1990s, it wouldn't play as well as to modernize the era to Khan's 2030s rise (adding some modern issue as a problem that gene enhancement would solve) as a prelude to WW3. The reason for the time shift is the audience remembers the 1990s and knows major events that happened. The "near future" and events connected to modern fears. In the same way, Discovery has to seem "far future" in a present where TOS (and non-TOS based innovations) has inspired major inventions (my cell phone can video call, holodecks are coming in the next decade, the look of advanced military planes has changed) that has updated what we expect the far future to look like.
I'm still baffled by the changes. They could have easily created "new" designs that were subtle changes to older designs in Klingon makeup and ship design exteriors. Granted for Starship interiors the changes would have to be less subtle due to just how cheaply made those sets were but it is far from impossible to create something that meets modern design standards for a well funded TV show AND has the feel of the original show. Something more akin to the unused concept art from the JJ films: http://i.imgur.com/3s8HKRm.jpg which includes brightness and colors popping everywhere. It's not the TOS bridge but it is at least evocative of it I think.
I prefer how the concept art doesn't have the tall visual obstructions of the finished product. That was my least favorite part of the Abrams bridge -- made it feel much less open than the original, even though it was big. (Plus, having all those sight obstacles runs counter to the purpose of a circular bridge.)
Kirk doesn't really have significant "sight obstacles" from his position, except perhaps behind him - and he's the one the whole set-up is for. Most people working at their stations on the original design were facing outward and so could rarely see anything other than their own stations.
In terms of actual use, it felt the same as the TOS bridge. The captain would come over to the station and check the data and return to his seat. Each station had a specialist who could provide necessary information. The Kelvin bridge actually had a few more people facing forward than in TOS.
Wow! That picture is amazing! Where did that come from? Are there more? I think they followed the architecture of this concept art pretty faithfull. But DAMN! The colors do SO. MUCH. It also shows they wanted to follow the original color scheme more - lots of orange, blue and red (although very little green). That looks so much better than the generic 'white/grey with blue display lights'-style every other science fiction show (including DIS) uses to codify "future".
Turns out the future is down the street and sells Apple products. After hours, it's very dark, just like Discovery.
Again, my point wasn't to use the exact same look and production values as in the '60's for an ongoing tv series. The point was that a new show set during the TOS era could look a lot more like TOS (as the Abrams films do) than what DSC does, and the audience would still accept it. As you say, the audience accepted Trials and Tribble-ations and In a Mirror Darkly precisely because they were homages to TOS, but the point was that they accepted it. I don't believe anyone's saying that they should reference stuff like that. Especially since in the episode of VOY when they went back in time to 1996, it wasn't acknowledged at all.
I never really thought the Abrams films looked a lot like the TOS sets. They look like their own thing, which is fine. Frankly, a lot of TOS no longer looks that futuristic, which is why DISCOVERY went a different direction. Take Kirk's chair for instance. It looked very advanced for the 1960s because of its boxy appearance making it look like it could function both as a chair and a computer, lots of buttons and so on. That's how people perceived the future back then, like a giant TV screen on the wall being futuristic. Now these days the chair just looks unnecessarily bulky because many people perceive something futuristically advanced as being more compact. If I were to tell someone in the 1960s the concept of an iPhone without giving away the size of it, they'd probably assume it would be the size of a brick.
A device that lets you speak to anyone anywhere in the world, and see them at the same time. A map of anywhere, in 3D, that gives you directions. You control it by voice. You can tell it to bring you food from your favourite restaurant. It tells you if traffic is bad. It has your entire record and movie collection, your photo albums and home movies. It tells you what your friends are doing and how you should vote. It brings you the weather and translates foreign languages. And it all fits in your hand and was made in china. They wouldn’t believe such a thing was possible.
Mirror Voq told her that the way to make peace with the Klingons is to provide a common enemy. Theoretically that's what she did when she gave L'Rell the bomb, that's what I think they were going for anyway, but it remains to be seen how that's followed through on.
My point wasn't whether they'd believe it was possible, only how they'd likely visualize the concept of it, much like how they visualized the concept of Star Trek. "The Captain's chair has control panels on the sides? Of course it would like like a bulky chair!"
I can tell you what I think the writers intended the point of that to be, and then why I think they failed, making the answer "no, it wasn't necessary." But I can't do that without spoiling a heckuva lot of details about episodes you haven't watched yet. This is an example of something that bugged me throughout the entire season: they were doing a war arc, but they kept presenting things as important, elusive strategic insights when they were actually ridiculously simple. A common enemy being a unifying factor is one of them. So is the idea that a show of force might impress a militaristic adversary, which was so important in the opening two-parter. So is "hey, maybe we should counterattack!", something that apparently occurred to no one not from the Mirror Universe. So is the notion that maybe you shouldn't trust someone who casually kills his/her own subordinates. So is the idea that if your enemy thinks of you as an existential threat, he'll fight harder. And so on, and so forth. I'm not a big follower of military history or military fiction, but even to me most of this stuff was screamingly obvious. Has nobody among the Starfleet brass ever read The Art of War? (More pertinently, has no one on the writing staff?) The whole thing wound up feeling like one giant idiot plot.
I think it's like going to a book club without having read the entirety of the book. Other people who've read the whole book can discuss it with someone who hasn't but not without spoiling things and it's not the same as discussing what they got from a commonly shared experience; the experience being reading the book or in DSC's case, watching the entire season or a specific episode or set of episodes in question. Other people have their way of preferring to do things, and I have mine. I came to grips with the fact that I do things differently than most other people (in general, not just with this) a long time ago. For why should they have gone to the Mirror Universe and why did I like it: I thought it was fun. I enjoyed it. And I don't have an answer for why they needed to. I haven't had years to analyze the show to death yet. I'm still taking it all in, I'm still enjoying it, I'm still being swept up by the experience, and the analytics will come as they occur to me. A few years from now, I'm sure I'll have analyzed every square inch of the series and will be able to answer these questions better. Right now, I'm not at that point yet. At this point: If I'm entertained, that's good enough for me. If I can keep up with what's going on, that's good enough for me. If there's something more to it, that's even better, but that's the last thing I was thinking of when I was watching. When I was watching, I was thinking, "This is a great episode! What are they going to do next?" I'm still at the "I just liked it and I know what I like!" stage of the game with this series. I'm not actively looking out for plot holes to poke. If I don't like it, I'll change the channel or stop watching. In such a situation where I lost interest but am interested in rechecking, I look at reviews from fans or critics whose opinions are similar to mine. If they thought it was great, there's a good chance I might. If there's someone who I never agree with or almost never agree with, then there's a good chance their opinion is incompatible with mine, so I might think it's not worth revisiting unless someone whose tastes more closely align with mine also recommends it or gives it a positive review.
Generally "no" but in this case "yes". Convincing someone online to change their mind about a series, a movie, or any form of entertainment, and to get them to do a total 180 is rare.