So what? That's what makes Scotty a miracle worker in TOS anyway. Pulling off the impossible is part of an engineer's job, from Trip to Torres.
That's the point: HE didn't do anything. They engineers who built the transporters of the outpost and the Enterprise already built them capable of beaming 40,000 times the distance thought being possible.
And you can't do such a thing just by doing some programming. It's like trying to double your Internet speed with programming (entering a "formula"), or the power of a walkie talkie, when in fact you needed to change the hardware: transmission medium, antennas, routers, etc...
And now you're just debating the realm of fictional science and engineering. I'm so sure the E-D's engines were never built to go faster than Warp 9.9, but we see them blazing through two galaxies and then into an unknown realm in Season 1. The E-D and Voyager's deflector dishes are built to deflect, not to time travel or reroute planetary gasses or open up dimensional rifts. Just how can a Cardassian mining station transmit a beacon to contact noncorporeal beings? LaForge didn't build that engine. Torres didn't build the deflector. O'Brien sure as heck didn't build Terok Nor.
In Trek, equipment often goes wayy beyond their normal configurations. Not much is said other than fancy-shmancy technobabble, but they're usually modified in story. Isn't it possible for Scotty to do that offscreen like so many others in Trek?
It brings up two things:
1. Starfleet tech tends to be super malleable (the Dominion hyperbole of Starfleet engineers turning rocks into tricorders comes to mind)
2. This sort of improvisation tends to be a Trek storytelling tradition across all the shows.
Granted, it makes as much sense as Jeff Goldblum's Mac-book hacking into the big bad mothership, but Starfleet tech is fictional.
Lastly, why can we accept Spock entering a few calculations (on the fly!) to make an inferior and rusty BoP capable of time travel, but we can't accept nuScotty getting someone from point A to point B with the same narrative logic? Just as Scotty didn't build the Abramsprise, Spock Prime didn't build that BoP. Do Klingons design Birds of Prey with the intent of time travel?
Could it be just the transporter's sensors doing that? Would it be possible to jerry-rig other sensors to the transporters? Every Trek ship we've seen has long-range sensors.
That doesn't explain why the beam itself has enough power and focus. Why would Starfleet Engineers build transmitters powerful enough to transmit particles across 40,000 times the distance that is thought to be the possible maximum?
Focus could happen in any number of ways. C'mon Picard, say "Magnify" to your viewscreen again! While you're at warp! I never could figure out how you could magnify an image traveling at warp (does their camera lens travel at warp?), but it just does.
As for power, while the movie never really said anything about power, I would imagine it would be a serious drain on transporter energy stores. Again, going back to Bloodlines, Geordi and Data themselves said that the Federation found long-distance beaming to be very costly energy-wise. Could it be different this time around? I don't imagine so.
Moreover, transwarp beaming means that this particle beam needed to travel faster than light, faster than warp. I really doubt that you could achieve that by just some programming.
Again, do we know the science that Scotty is or should be employing? Should the audience be bored down by technobabble in order to explain that? As nuScotty said, he based his concepts not on objects themselves moving, but on space itself moving. Perhaps folding, which itself sounds like the FTL drives used in Event Horizon, and that in itself uses a model of science that's different than much of Trek. Maybe they open up a micro-wormhole, since wormholes can travel faster than warp. It's conjecture on my part too, but you're also using conjecture since, hey, it works. In any sci-fi film, science is at the mercy of the story.
I'm still a bit taken aback by the idea that Starfleet has technology that can create planets. It's never really explained how they do it other than a quick and convenient synopsis by Carol Marcus (what's the Matrix? why does protomatter, well, matter? how could it assemble the Mutara Nebula? etc. etc. etc). But 27 years later, no one really considers this lack of technobabble explanation a fault of TWOK. Genesis just does what the story dictates. It's really a device comprised of wonderful nonsense in a really wonderful movie.
They could have let Scotty crawl into a Jeffries tube to fix the hardware, that would have been an opportunity for a good homage.
Now this we can agree on. Drink two shots if a panel fuses right in front of his face!
