Sometimes, I had the same feeling then.
A lot of times it feels like someone pretending not to know about something, because the something is geeky and uncool, and then not long after comes the hidden moment where they forget themselves and are caught quoting Darmok or something. Like to survive as A general actor, they have to be careful not to reveal that actually it’s not that bad, and playing up how hard it is just makes them sound funnier or cooler. Cho is obviously doing that with his Star Wars gag for instance.
Some of the Trek actors, sensibly, have pointed out it’s closer tos Shakespeare. There can be a bunch of stuff with words we don’t really know or understand, but once you have the rhythm down, and a basic understanding, it’s easy...and it is. Ninety percent of Treknobablle is basically ‘the lightbulb is blown, so I am changing the lightbulb’ just with a made up word in place of lightbulb, and a different degree of urgency as to whether it’s just a hallway bulb or one currently lighting an operating table during open heart surgery. It’s really not hard for a decent actor.
Trek itself is so established that it has a bunch of words that should just be in the actors vocabulary as soon a s they go for the job. Hence cho not bothering to joke with dilithium, but did so with warp, because it’s a real word and so he can do that easier on the spot.
We know the words aren’t that hard (as opposed to say learning a ew or fictional language for a role) because even if we are saying ‘inverse tachyon beam’ there’s either a follow on line in the script to explain it, or it’s already functional enough in context for an audience to get it.
Anyone who really gets stuck on technobabble is basically like Catherine Tates Nan character when she can’t understand what a dark-skinned but otherwise perfectly English speaking person says...I.e being deliberately obtuse.
