I did, and while claiming that stid was a copy of it is a hyperbole, I think that the second half of the movie re-told that story and thus lacks originality.
I agree that the reactor-core "death" scene was an overly derivative mistake, but I think it's the only part of the movie that really was just a copy; the reason it was a bad mistake is that it overshadows the rest in people's minds and leads them to see the whole thing as a copy. I think it would've been a stronger film if they'd handled that one part differently. And I'm inclined to blame that on Damon Lindelof, since he was reportedly the one who insisted that the villain be Khan. And he's not involved in the next film.
Christopher I do get your point but that wasn't what I necessarily meant with my statement.
I'm not saying that they should be completely different, but I question how they can be that similar to tos or (more specifically) how this can be an origin story of tos when they did explicitly state that it's another reality both in interviews and with canon. They did things with these characters (destroying vulcan above all) that just make the whole 'this is a prequel of tos' a tad impossible IMO unless they use a thing called retcon
But it's not all-or-nothing. Just because some things change, that doesn't mean that everything else has to be completely different. Trek is full of alternate timelines where a lot of things play out much the same way despite some pretty massive differences -- like the Mirror Universe, where everyone still ends up on the
Enterprise in the same jobs despite living in a warlike dictatorship.
After all, there are many, many causal factors shaping the course of history. You can change a few of them in major ways, but a lot of the others will still play out largely unaltered. For instance, if you killed Hitler as a child, the bitter nationalism and anti-Semitism that converged in Germany and Austria in the 1930s would still have been there and would've probably found a different focus -- and the loss of Hitler wouldn't have changed the actions of Imperial Japan in the Pacific. And that's not even getting into the personal scale, the individuals who would still have grown up in the same places with the same personalities. Hitler dying in childhood wouldn't have prevented my grandfather Emmett from meeting Mary Buzzelle, marrying her, and having four kids, the youngest being my father in 1933. So my family's life might have played out much the same even in a world where Hitler never rose to power. You can change some things enormously and other things will still go pretty much the way they did "before."
Besides, this is fiction, so the writers can have the timeline happen however they want it to. Their goal was to show something that worked at least approximately as an origin story for the characters we know, but they wanted the freedom to alter the continuity where necessary so they wouldn't be locked in. Hence the conceit that, while many big key events are different, a lot of the more personal-scale stuff plays out the same way -- like characters' decisions to go into Starfleet, their assignments to the same ship, the friendships they form, etc.
Orci is a bit contradictory. One moment he says that this is a different reality separated from tos and they can do what they want and there is no fixing of the timeline, but then he makes statements like the one posted by OP here where he says everything will eventually be like tos anyway (bye bye free will)
That's not contradictory at all. It only seems that way if you insist on reducing all of reality to a choice between absolute, black-and-white extremes. But most of reality is actually found in the middle ground between the absolutes. Most things in life are a little from column A and a little from column B. So it's not the least bit contradictory to say that the new reality is like the old one in some ways but different in others at the same time.
Which made my body cringe all over.
or their age, see Chekov) 
