^I don't think they object to the changes happening, they were just caught off-guard to see the end result without having been shown how they got there. One of the objections that used to be raised about Star Trek: The Motion Picture for a long time was that the characters were out of character, not the people we knew. Which always seemed odd to me, because that was the point of the movie -- that the characters had moved on in their lives and gone through changes that weren't necessarily for the better, and needed to come back together and gradually recover the rapport they'd once shared. But a lot of people were just thrown by seeing the characters suddenly acting so differently than they had before.
All very true. I really enjoyed TMP from the beginning. Both the movie and the novel. The only thing I did not like was the uniforms in that movie.