The relentless insistence on treating the fictional science in SF as equivalent to fantasy means that all you have left is the characters. Treknology is retro, and it makes the stories retro. Going retro means choosing the old ideas.
The recent movies have given us Bond in Space meets the Odd Couple. But Spock is not Felix Unger. Given the ineptitude of the character work, there are very few ideas for a new show. That's why we're already reduced in the movie series to an alternate-universe remake of Wrath of Khan.
What they're not going to do is write SF stories with any relevance, no matter how strongly the characters' choices would define them. The only conceivable "interesting" characters in this mindset are cool, bad ass clichés, which means modern day characters. The disconnect between those characters and the supposed future will inevitably disconnect real emotional investment for anyone who doesn't identify with a particular sock puppet.