From a practical standpoint, showing the raptors as plausibly feathered would have been nearly impossible in 1993. Jurassic Park pushed then-current CGI to its limits modeling life-like skin and scales. With the uncertainty about the evolutionary relationship and the effects limitations, it's no wonder Spielberg portrayed the dinosaurs in a more traditional fashion.
No, it's simply that at the time, the notion that theropods were feathered was not yet accepted in paleontological circles. As I've said, the science has advanced a great deal since that movie was made. Look at
Walking with Dinosaurs, which was made in 1999 and depicted dinosaurs as accurately as was possible at the time. Its theropods weren't feathered either. It's only in the past decade or less that the notion of feathered theropods has become widely accepted.
And of course most of the dinosaur effects in JP were done live with animatronics courtesy of Stan Winston, since the movie's effects were planned with the assumption that stop-motion would be used for the rest and Spielberg wanted to keep its use to a minimum. So the amount of CGI in the film tends to be overestimated. It was used only for full-length shots, shots of the dinosaurs running or jumping, and the like.
I wouldn't really know, but I would imagine there'd be some kind of effect passing from a vacuum into a cloud of dust and gas. Could it be dense enough to exert some kind of drag on the ship?
Real nebulae
are vacuum by our standards. The density of your typical nebula is lower than the density of the solar wind around the Earth. The dense, opaque nebulae featured in Trek and other mass-media SF are as imaginary as the dense, cluttered asteroid fields we so often see in movies and TV. (At least, so far as we know. I've had the thought that, given that there's evidence that brown dwarfs and rogue planets can form independently, it follows that there may well be atypically small clouds of nebular matter from which those things would condense. And due to their low overall mass, they'd condense rather slowly and thus could retain a density comparable to what we see in TV and movies for an astronomically significant length of time. In my TNG novel
The Buried Age, I used these conjectural "micronebulae" as a justification for the anomalously small, dense nebulae seen in Trek.)
I've always looked at the Genesis Effect as being akin to a transporter. Changing barren rock to fertile soil would be simple with such a machine but showing the technology's full capabilities would have given the characters godlike powers.
I've had the same thought, that Genesis is an extension of transporters and replicators, but where it falls apart is the sheer scale of it. It would take a vast amount of power and probably a very large device to make it happen. I read the novelization of TWOK before I saw the movie, and I imagined the Genesis torpedo as a massive missile. When I went to the movie and saw that it was this skinny little 5-foot-long gizmo, I scoffed at the idea that something so tiny could transform an entire planet, let alone create one.
. Armageddon was the same as well, alot of fun but absurd.
