Warning this will be TL/DR material.
It's almost impossible to discuss Vulcans without ENT, as the previous Berman era did not really deal with them except as this-weeks-crazy-person or minor character and the TOS era was brief and usually dealt with other things.
And you can't really discuss Vulcans very well without discussing their interactions with humans as the most famous Vulcan is half-human, and Earth's debut into galactic society is due to Vulcan, at least in part.
And this is where it gets ugly. I am quoting another franchise here.
"You haven't idealized mankind but you deformed it. You mutilated it. That's your legacy." -The Watchmen.
Humanity never got its chance to take its baby steps into the wider universe around it. The heat shield was probably still warm when the Vulcans came in to gift gifts to the natives and put things in order. As this kind of gunboat diplomacy goes, it was generally benign. Earth got its shit together. But how bad was Earth, anyway? It was capable of launching a massive colony ship within twenty years of First Contact, along with other major endeavors. It was mining the moon, terraforming Mars, and despite being held back technologically, economically, and diplomatically it was trying to plot its own course, despite being held back as a defacto client states, by the Vulcans. What Earth could have become without the Vulcans might have been just as impressive, or moreso.
In some ways the best thing that could have happened to Earth was the initial Xindi weapon test. Vulcan had no answer to it, had no assistance to offer. A worsening situation with its other neighbors allowed earth to begin shrugging off Vulcan's control. That suzerainty had come at least with some expectation of safety and in this Vulcan had failed entirely. Vulcan and Earth were not done with each other but the dynamic changed irrevocably the moment the death ray hit Florida.
When the dust would finally clear with the end of the Romulan War, Vulcans would begin to be shown up repeatedly, victims of their arrogance, their petty political arguments, xenophobia, and slow development cycle in comparison to Earth. Sarek seemed to see that Vulcan society was lacking something. He may have seen the answer as strengthening ties to Earth, even biologically. In the end he proved right though the missing piece was the Romulan society it had been torn asunder from.
this sums up the problem and nature of Vulcan/Earth relations. Earth was both grateful and resentful of Vulcan, but Vulcan had a more powerful emotion, one that as a species they would never come to terms with, fear of their upstart younger siblings. Vulcan seems to be a culture that has fear built into its very framework.
