I started to reply to this yesterday, then wanted to do more thinking about it.
For me, the movie era (1982-1986) is my native era of Star Trek, anchored by the films and cemented by the ongoing comic books, even though I recognize it's a very flawed era. It's what I grew up with. (Like Keith, I think Star Trek III isn't a particularly good film. The script is mechanical in the extreme, and Leonard Nimoy's pedestrian direction does it no favors.) Still, it's my era, and I have great fondness for it.
It's also the time when I read Walter Irwin and G.B. Love's Best of Trek books obsessively. Quite honestly, at that time, it was easier for me to get hold of those than it was the Pocket novels. The discussions on Star Trek II (volumes 6 and 7) and Star Trek III (volumes 8 through 10) were influential on my thinking when I was about ten.
I remember an article about a "fan on the street" survey. The writer went up to fans at a convention and asked them a number of questions. One of those questions was whether or not the main cast should be replaced over time by newer/younger characters (similar to M*A*S*H).
That may have been Harve Bennett's idea when he worked on Star Trek II -- Spock dies, we're introduced to a possible replacement, we meet Kirk's son -- but it was an idea quickly abandoned, as the next film undoes two of those three changes, and the film after that writes out the third. One of the movie era's great flaws is that, after cracking (though not entirely breaking) the status quo in Star Trek II, the next two films then seal up those cracks.
If that's what Bennett wanted to do -- reformat Star Trek with a replacement cast that can carry it for a long time -- biennial movies were the wrong format; when you only have two hours of content every 24-30 months and a large cast to fit in, there's only so much one can do. He would have needed something on a tighter timeframe, like television movies every six months or so. But Bennett's unwillingness to cut cast loose (like George Takei when he turned down Star Trek II) and his release schedule not only closed off the option of introducing a "next generation" but also cemented the idea of the "Big Seven" as opposed to the "Big Three" with familiar, semi-regular day players.
Star Trek III begins at the crossroads "for deciding whether to carry forward with new characters, or turn away and favor nostalgia by bringing back Spock." And when it ends, the franchise has turned irrevocably away -- at least until a new television series built a new crew from the ground up.
To bring this back to the novels, one of the things I liked about McIntyre's novelization of this (and Star Trek II) was the sense that Starfleet was more than just the Enterprise. I have always been intrigued by Mandala Flynn's story mentioned in passing in the two books (she's commanding a ship that's testing transwarp drive and exploring the Andromeda Galaxy), and I have wanted that story since the 1980s. McIntyre's Star Trek universe feels "big," and what happens with Kirk and the Enterprise only scratches the surface.
I meant to reply to this ages ago, but busy times, and forgetfulness delayed me. I too feel quite a strong affection and affinity for that specific section of ST, the 82-86 era. The look and feel of it, and what it introduces. I think your analysis is interesting, how some of the forward momentum of introducing new characters and situations gets curtailed is unfortunate.
We as fans want to see the familiar character back in action. Yet there's that idea of how ST can continue beyond that, and the sense of a bigger setting beyond the margins of the Enterprise and her crew. And there's the fact that new material wasn't being produced very rapidly. Spock's death is a major shake-up, but there's a two-year wait before the impact is seen. When it's only movies every couple of years, and you get to the tension point of choosing to favor new or old...I've seen (and thought about) alternative ways that might have juggled those elements.
When it comes to the idea of resurrecting a character, the story for TSFS sells it well from the standpoint that there's a heavy cost to accomplish a miracle of that scale (science fiction or not). It's not as easy to remember the countless times a character dies for a short time in the television incarnation of TOS. The death of Spock has real weight, and reversing it has a terrible cost, and it's why it's a convincing resurrection story, I guess. One of the best.
The Enterprise and David. Both of them die, as the penalty for bringing back Spock. And there's good argument for not simply putting the crew on a new ship that looks exactly like the old one. David, though, well...I think there's a case to be made for diminishing TSFS as a convincing resurrection story, for the sake of having saved him.
It would have been really interesting to advance the character of David, and make it impactful for the character of Kirk. And there's the tendency to pair David with Saavik, but let's say hypothetically it's not necessarily a romantic one, you could still put them together for adventures, and if they're dynamic enough then that has a knock-on effect of giving the character of Saavik life outside of the idea that she is "Spock's replacement." When Spock comes back, and with David dead, she really has kind of been rendered redundant, to a certain extent, I guess (I don't necessarily buy that, I think a good writer could take the character and keep her going, either with the crew or on her own with other characters around her).
As for Vonda McIntyre's contributions, I really enjoyed the broader picture she introduces in The Entropy Effect. And she keeps some of the characters and situations in mind as she novelized three movies, and it's intriguing to imagine what she might have come up with. If David had lived, could we have gotten a novel about Saavik and David having adventures? A novel about Hunter and her ship Aerfen would have been great. In the same vein, one about Mandala Flynn and the Magellan. If I'm honest, on the weirder side of things, given what we learn from TWoK and TSFS novelizations, I would have liked a really long character piece about the lives and times of Del March and Vance Madison, with hints about the mystery of Del March and his past (never, never explicitly revealing his real name and origin), and an extensive appendix at the back for the gameplay outline of Boojum Hunt, the computer game that swallowed Saturn.
