To be fair, I'm not sure what the earliest reference to Federation cabinet secretaries would be. Are there references to cabinet secretaries in Kenneth Wescott's administration in the Errand of Fury books?
Hm. That might dovetail nicely with the idea I batted about where a commissioner is the government's "field commander" in a less built-up region of space.
Well, the idea with the Commonwealth of Nations is that their membership in the Commonwealth and their historical ties as former colonies of the British Empire means that these states, while fully sovereign, are not truly foreign to one-another, the way that they are to states outside the Commonwealth. The practice was set by those states for whom the British Monarch also reigns as local monarch, called the Commonwealth realms. (There is a legally separate monarchy for each Commonwealth realm that the Monarch holds separately and simultaneously -- so Her Majesty is simultaneously Queen of the United Kingdom, Queen of Canada, Queen of New Zealand, Queen of The Commonwealth of the Bahamas, etc.) Since they share the same head of state, they cannot exchange ambassadors, because ambassadors in legal theory represent one head of state to another. Thus, the evolution of the term "High Commissioner" (whose diplomatic missions are called High Commissions rather than Embassies), who represents one head of government (Prime Minister) to the other instead of one head of state to the other. This practice is carried over by those members of the Commonwealth who are either republics or who have monarchies not inhabited by the House of Windsor, but its legal justification comes from the Commonwealth realms.
I suppose in theory, if one were writing Star Trek fresh and anew, it would make sense for Federation Member States to exchange High Commissioners with one-another rather than ambassadors, since in theory they're all part of the same sovereign state in the UFP and thus all share the same head of state in the UFP President. But that ship has sailed.
I'm inclined to disregard the "Galactic" part, or perhaps to speculate that it's a bit of informal slang on the part of the people who used it, the equivalent of calling the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy the "drug czar."
) involves the unknown caretaker and the implications that it represents the remnant of an ancient people, but there isn't much to say. Part of me quite likes the idea of a galaxy filled with inexplicable artefacts and tailored environments left by any number of departed civilizations that may have achieved wonders (and the eccentric outlooks that probably correlate with that degree of creativity). We can do better than this, though, and there isn't anything interesting to learn or even conjecture about the galaxy based on what we see here. I don't even care who the creators were (Magratheans, I assume). We'll revisit in the Animated Series, and I don't think we learn anything new in that instalment.
