This is a long thread and for all I know I've already logged this sentiment, but I think the real problem with Trek V is that there was no compelling reason to make it. Each subsequent Trek film seemed to spawn from loose threads of the prior one, at least from II onward as II was kind of a soft reboot. By the time you get to the end of Trek IV there is a hard break. Also, from a franchise perspective, Trek IV would have been the best time to call it a day as all energy was being directed towards TNG. The combination of not really having more story to tell with the original crew and mindshare shifting to TNG made it incredibly difficult to give people a compelling reason to head back to the theaters to watch the old guard.
Now if Trek VI had been released instead of Trek V, complete with the linkage to TNG through Worf's ancestor and all, then that probably would have worked, because the huge difference between the TOS and TNG era was the peace made between the Klingons, whereas Kirk suffered the most at the hands of Klingons when his son was murdered. For whatever reason, they didn't come up with that story then and instead produced a glorified TV episode.
There are three Trek movies that feel like glorified TV episodes, Trek V, Insurrection, and Beyond, and none of them did very well. The film medium is just different from TV. You expect something...higher stakes. TMP was the most pretentious in that regard, and Trek V at times I think was shooting for that, but injecting Orville like humor in a way that subverted it.
But seriously, even if ILM had done all the effects, even if the sets were flawless, the shuttle bay in perfect proportion, Spock said "marshmallows", Uhura not done the embarassing feather dance, it still would have been nothing but a "just another day at the office" TV episode sort of story at a time when people were starting to tune into TNG each week for that.
If they really wanted the TOS crew to take the Enterprise-A out for a new extended mission they should have launched a new series around them instead. I was hoping they'd have done that myself because it would have made far more use out of the aging cast than we wound up getting with the movies spaced 2+ years apart. So I've got nothing against more TV series like stories, but they belong on the small screen.
But you just can't do Trek movies for the sake of just pushing out an obligatory product. They have to be a story that feels like it needs to be told.
