But I kind of prefer real characters who are messy, with tons of character conflicts over the 1-Dimensional Racial Stereo Types. I don't mind muddy story & themes.First, I kind of disagree with this. Characterization should not be one-dimensional, but real people are always going to be more multifaceted than characters, because real people have tons of character conflicts which, if put into fictional media, would needlessly muddle story and themes.
Worf was required to job to make the enemy look threatening since we're supposed to associate Klingons with being stronger than humans on average, luckily they fixed that in ST:PIC & some of the ST:TNG movies.More importantly though, there's a difference between having deeper characterization and just changing characterization for a momentary plot point. Think about how often in early TNG they made Worf accidentally look like a wuss, since his role was often just to get the crap kicked out of him by the antagonist of the week to show how intimidating they were. He became a joke character to a large degree, until finally they began deepening and broadening his characterization, rather than just contradicting it.