True, but the point is, you don't need to. I have seen what Gamers have done with the Trek setting over the years and look at the setting the Authors of Pocket Books have done with the Novels, or how STO's Trek setting has its own stories and style. Its a large setting and you can do so very much while "keeping in the lines" of the setting.
Whether DSC is a product of lazy writers is (at this point) perhaps impossible to disentangle from the messed-up way that its story, characters, time period, etc. were decided upon. Non-lazy writing can still result in stupid stories with stupid resolutions, of course. Last night I saw (on H&I) "A Taste of Armageddon," which I consider a shining example of (non-serialized) Trek writing - it's about something, a matter of planetary life and death (while avoiding the easy choice of killing someone on screen), and yet has room for the momentary comic relief of the "Sir, there is a multilegged creature..." scene. The intelligence of the characters was apparent throughout their dialogue. One could argue, 50 years on, that any Trek revival unable to meet the standard of the best 1960s episodes is basically a money grab.
Because these producers aren't going to do a series with a White male lead. They specifically wanted a Black female and all the heroes to be minority characters. A Pike series would never work with the Discovery showrunners.
I don’t consider the DSC writers lazy, for the record. They make bad choices sometimes, but there’s not so much lazy writing as there is them trying to deal with the format and the choices being made and goalposts changes as they went along.
They could have had a female version of Pike. That is, it could have been established that crew members can now easily transition back and forth between male and female more than once in their lives, as in many John Varley stories; it would constitute another aspect of pre-TOS-era technology (like the spore drive) that just happened not to have been mentioned previously.
He's just a pretty well sign posted character in the franchise, may as well stick to keeping him original.
I think they should do a Pike series at some point. He was captain of the Enterprise for what 15 years? I wouldn't mind seeing an April show either. Maybe something online for the die hards between Discovery seasons and whatever movies end up being released.
I haven't read all the responses in the thread but I wonder if there is a legal reason they couldn't do a Pike series. I saw something about the Discovery folks saying something about them not having access to all of the characters and stuff from the films. And Pike was in Trek 09 and Into Darkness. Granted he's dead in the Kelvin timeline now, but a Pike show set in the Prime Timeline would have to have Spock in it, or fans would likely want that, and I don't know if they can use him, or have him as a starring character on a series. Personally I would've liked to have seen an April series. To really canonize him. And that would've given them 20 something years before TOS and a little more space to play around with uniforms and the like.
You could say the same for a lot of the TOS stuff as well, but if there's a block there for some (which I don't know the extent of) then I could see them not using Pike, or being very sparing with their use of him. Who knows if Paramount has placed any weird restrictions about the use of movie-tied characters at this point. I would hope not because I would like to see a Discovery version of the Pike ("Cage") crew. Granted I would like to see Bruce Greenwood as Pike again but it's fine if they went with another actor. Perhaps Matthew Fox or Brett Dalton.
The block is just movie stuff. Just as its been since the split. This is why you got Kelvin, they could not touch the TV shows, but the movies had the names and aliens and so on, so all that stuff was far game. They would not be able to use a movie only character, but could if it was used on one of the shows.
I see two white males in that image. Also, five of the nine are white, and four of the nine are male. Pretty evenly divided. Hypothetically, a Pike show doesn't have to have Chris Pike as the lead. They could focus on Number One, young Spock, or more likely, some new figure that becomes important to the history.