You do know that tech goes backwards in real life too? While the solid state drives replacing hard drives in laptops are technically much faster, the long term data retention of such drives is far below that of the older hard drives. Eventually all the charges in a solid state drive will wear out, and leakage means data is lost much earlier than in hard drives, where magnetic polarity shifts more slowly.
Starfleet and the Federation have been shown to be inconsistent in their overreactions. Besides, since holographic communication eventually comes back (briefly) it seems something that was tinkered on again and off again.
In the real world military, some ultra secure command codes are still on floppy disks... Sometimes, the military is often the slowest to deploy the latest tech, and sometimes it's the fastest.
If sex with holograms really works for ponn farr, maybe Vulcans should just masturbate every seven years instead.
Except it didn't work. It was only temporary, which is why B'Elanna and Vorik beat the crap out of each other while three crewmates watch. Perfectly logical...
It worked for Tuvok.
Tuvok was a lot older than Vorik so maybe that had something to with it.
Nah, Tuvok even said in the episode with his ponn farr that the Vulcan libido increases with age. So if anything, him being older than Vorik should have made it less likely to work.
I'm thinking he just had more experiences to figure out how to make it work.
