Of course it's about money. It has been from day one, as you'll see below.
Read this, Franz Joseph's daughter Karen Dick explaining some of the legal issues, and FJ's thoughts on some of the technical fanzines that used elements of his work. It's a fascinating read: http://www.trekplace.com/fj-kdint05.html#q19
Here are some quotes:
Now stay with me here, 'cause this is the most Important Part of this whole interview. If you follow the FJ Timeline through 1975 and 1976, Paramount rejects script after script from GR and others, while FJ's Plans and Manual climb the bestseller lists to astronomical heights. GR's head must have been ready to explode. Then, if you read further, Paramount starts to court FJ as a consultant for the movie but FJ declines any involvement. At that point, Paramount and GR have the same problem. Because of the aborted Lincoln Enterprises deal to publish the Plans and the Tech Manual in 1973, and because Lou Mindling of Paramount allowed FJ to copyright the Manual in his own name in 1975, neither GR nor Paramount owns the rights to FJ's original work (such as the Star Fleet space station, the Dreadnought and other ship designs, the UFP "two faces and starfield" logo, etc.). [The rest of this paragraph is pure speculation, but I don't think I'm too far off the mark.] GR doesn't want to use FJ's designs because he feels he has had little control over their creation and no control over their publication, and he'll be damned if he'll pay royalties to an outsider for stuff spun off from the universe he created. Further, FJ has proven difficult to deal with in other encounters (Planet Earth) and GR doesn't want to go through that again. Paramount desperately wants FJ to be involved with the movie because FJ's work is so enormously popular, but FJ is not being a "team player" and agreeing to be a consultant or a writer on the project. If FJ is not going to be directly involved so they can exploit his name in their publicity, then Paramount doesn't want to pay him royalties, either. After that point, everything in the movies was either designed to directly contradict FJ's work, or to modify designs or concepts first put forward by FJ to make them just different enough that FJ could not claim copyright infringement (especially the UFP logo you mention in Q12 ). In retrospect, knowing what a "control freak" GR was about the series and the movies (as documented in many written accounts), none of this is a surprise to me.
By the mid-1980s, GR was telling his production staff (such as Michael Okuda) that FJ was just a "fan kook" who had drawn the Blueprints and TM on his own, without GR's permission. GR was also denying he had had any contact with FJ at all. And we suddenly got things like "official" publications discussing the ships of Star Fleet and saying that a 3-nacelle design was "unstable," and that the Dreadnought had been dropped from production after one prototype because of its destructive power. Then, just last week I ran across "Roddenberry's Rules of Starship Design"; on the Internet (see http://www.ex- astris-scientia.org/my_ships/design.htm ), which were supposedly told to Andy Probert by Roddenberry himself. Said rules were obviously conceived after the publication of the Tech Manual to completely invalidate all of FJ's original ship designs. Rule 1, "Nacelles must be in pairs," eliminates the Dreadnoughts, Destroyers, and Scouts. Rule 2, "There must be at least 50% line of sight visibility between a pair of nacelles across the hull," eliminates Tugs/Transports hauling cargo containers. Rule 3, "Both warp nacelles must be fully visible from the front," doubly eliminates Dreadnoughts. Nice, huh?
But see above, they were! Not very pleasent, but that's the truth of it.
Of course not. No one's telling anyone what to think. That old stuff comes together as a neat little continuity, just like the 80's novels based on the Spaceflight Chonology. They're fun. But it's fair to say that those running Trek in the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT era were operating under a different set of assumpions. None are right or wrong, they're just different extrapolations from the source material - the FJ manual based on TOS and TAS alone, Okuda's including TOS, the movies and TNG era stuff too.
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