Because if you actually watch "Journey to Babel" and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, you'll be reminded that Sarek is, in fact, a total jerk.
I think you may be on to something here. I was reading "Child of Two Worlds" this morning, and the opening scene is a rather painful scene of Spock's mother trying to get him to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. As Spock steadfastly refuses to even do this small "human" thing to please his own mother it occured to me that Sarek is a complete tool.
Spock seems to go through a lot of self loathing and denial about his struggling with his emotions. He nearly always blames it on his regretable human half, when, as we are frequently reminded, Vulcans themselves are extremely emotional.
It's kind of depressing thinking about Spock being bullied as a child by Vulcan children while having to simultaneously deal with his father's disappointment when they are just hypocritically punishing for the same "sin" of having the same emotions that they do.
excuse the typos. I hate typing on a Kindle.
Back on topic: i recently read, Child of Two Worlds, Crisis of Consciousness, Mere Anarchy, and Section 31 Cloak.
I like this bit from Cloak:
He understood that people wanted answers, they wanted solid rules that they could apply to every situation . . . it was the nature of man, he’d always thought, to want to figure everything out in advance. To know how you’re supposed to feel and what you’re supposed to think without having to constantly question everything, all the time. He wanted it, too, and why not? Everything would be so simple. And if life actually worked that way, we would all be able to close our minds, to stick to our personal convictions without ever having to listen to anyone else’s. To never doubt ourselves . . . but at the expense of never changing. Starfleet was a military organization. It was also a pacifistic organization, and a scientific one, and many other things . . . and in Starfleet as in life, any situation was best handled by trying to see it with a clear eye before making a choice.
More on Cloak: I think SDP did a nice job of working a couple of classic TOS plots into a shiny new Section 31 package. The only minor complaint is that the McCoy illness subplot is resolved in an actual episode instead of the book itself. Unavoidable, really, i suppose. It just seems anticlimactic.
For the World is Hollow is an episode that I would love to see novelized. It just seems so rushed. Between Cloak and Ex Machina it's clear that there was room to expand on that storyline to great effect.