Although I've long felt that the way Trek approaches exploration makes little sense. If you're going to explore a planet, you don't just drop in for a few days, visit one place, and then leave. Exploring a whole planet would take years or decades. I've often thought a more plausible and interesting approach would be to devote an entire season to exploring a given planet, with multiple nations and cultures and biomes and historic ruins and developing cultural conflicts and so forth, and then start over with a different planet the next season.
I suppose it made more sense in the TOS era, where the Enterprise's mission was not pure exploration, but frontier patrol, colony support, and the like, with exploration being something it did along the way in between diplomatic, military, humanitarian, and law enforcement missions. I guess TNG ended up showing the E-D's mission similarly; indeed, though "Encounter at Farpoint" asserted that it was pushing beyond the furthest edge of explored space into the unknown frontier, the show immediately abandoned that and had the next few episodes be about things like aiding another Starfleet ship in distress, obtaining a vaccine for a Federation colony world, and participating in a Starfleet engineering experiment. And the emphasis on political and diplomatic missions only increased as the show went on.
