I'm a pretty big Star Trek nut myself. I grew up on it, it's my favorite franchise, it helped form a lot of my ethics and worldview growing up, it means a lot to me. The first Halloween costume I ever asked for as a kid, I asked to dress up as Jean-Luc Picard. I have put myself into a cycle where I have been constantly watching Star Trek uninterrupted for close to two decades at this point as well, where I start at the beginning of the franchise, and then just watch every single episode/film until I get to the end, and then I start all over again, all in my free time. It is not always on my mind, but I expend perhaps an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it, and I dare say my knowledge of the franchise is fairly exhaustive. So believe me when I say that I get where you're coming from here, and that your perspective and attitude used to be me once upon a time, long long ago.
The way you look at nuTrek (or maybe not all of nuTrek, but certainly Picard) is the way I used to look at the post-TNG spin-off shows. I was a lot younger, so my criticisms weren't as thought out and considered, but I found myself nitpicking the spin-off shows to the point where they were just upsetting and uninteresting to me. I used to get upset at how DS9 was stuck on a stationary space station and betrayed the ethos of Star Trek where it would be about exploring new, exotic locales on a regular basis, or how Voyager's design seemed kind of derpy, or how Sisko was just a Commander and not a Captain, or how the early seasons of all the post-TNG shows felt very mid compared to the sustained excellence of TNG. After a while, complaints settled into biases, and I would find new reasons to be upset at the shows despite in hindsight those things not really mattering. I hated that they dumped Kes (an objectively boring character) for Seven who I thought was just there for crass sex appeal, even though she might be one of the best characters in the whole franchise, for example. I never delved into full hate-watching, but there came a point where I stopped religiously watching the show and not really caring if I missed an episode here or there. And eventually, I got to the point where I just stopped watching them all together. Disappointment, disillusionment, betrayed expectations, as well as moving into high school and attempting to kind of distance myself from a lot of my more nerdier hobbies and tendencies in order to fit in, led to disengagement and borderline disavowment of the franchise. I stopped watching DS9 and VOY in their 6th/7th seasons (came back for the finales but felt very meh about both) and dropped ENT towards the end of the first season all together.
Time passed, and after finding myself in a rut post-college, I found myself watching a few stray Voyager episodes with a really good friend from HS who, unbeknownst to me at the time, was also a big Star Trek fan. Voyager was *his* Star Trek though, in the way TNG and especially the TOS films were *my* Star Trek. Free of expectations of what I wanted this show to be (more TNG) and that this show had to carry the burden of carrying on the franchise (which was dead at this point), and allowing myself to open up to the infectious enthusiasm my friend had for it, I found myself really enjoying it, and missing Star Trek in general a whole lot. So I went about rewatching TNG and VOY with my buddy (we were roommates at the time) and it became really potent comfort food that helped me get through some personally dark times. (That phrasing might be overly dramatic, but certainly helped me keep treking along through some potent/sustained bouts of depression). And after finishing watching those shows again, with my passion for the franchise renewed, but faced with a dearth of new content to the franchise, I entertained a curious notion - what if I went back and rewatched the rest of the franchise that I'd neglected or thought poorly of? Maybe the change in perspective that led me to enjoying Voyager more, might be true of the rest of the franchise that I hadn't held much care for previously.
And you know what? Turns out, everything else was pretty damned good too. DS9 ended up being way better than I remember it ever being. I remember thinking the CGI on the show (like Odo's shape shifting) looking kind of cheap back in the 90s, but a good decade removed and my expectations adjusted, I wasn't bothered by that. Or by the conceit of the show. Instead of being disappointed I wasn't watching more of TNG, I really made it a point to try and approach each show based on its own merits and what it wanted to be. That, and new perspectives like being older and seeing the Jake/Ben relationship from the perspective of an adult vs the perspective of a child, suddenly I kinda got what they were going for. Being settled on a space station wasn't a con, it allowed for telling different kinds of stories and perspectives that TNG/TOS's format never allowed for. And knowing generally where things went and how things turned out, freed myself from the anxiety and expectations of watching it live as it was happening, not knowing if any of it would end up going in the right directions or paying off well.
And that adjustment of expectations, as well as recentering my perspectives on things, really helped adjust my attitudes towards all of the old shows. ENT ended up doing really interesting things as a prequel/sequel and had really strong acting performances/lovable characters. The 'bad' parts of TOS were their own kind of fun, and the good parts held up better than they have any right to. Even The Animated Series - which I was always told as a child was a bliteringly, stupid, repulsive, waste of time, ended up being hilarious at worst, and had a few really strong episdoes and conceits. And the self-reflection and discovery of just how wildly expectations can affect our perceptions was really rather eye opening to me as an individual as well.
I'd always known that was the case intellectually, but it's different to really just sit down and analyze methodically/logically how much it really does affect our thought processes and how illogical it all is. When you begin to expect something to be bad, you tend to go into it setting yourself up for failure. You dwell on all of the things that you perceive as wrong, even if logically speaking, there isn't anything actually wrong or different. And when your emotional state is so charged with negativity, it's hard to really focus on giving the thing you're engaged with a good faith try to see all of the good and interesting things it might also be doing at the same time. And the same is true if you go into something too eager or with high expectations as well. Especially if it's stemming from something you really enjoyed in the past. When we look back at TNG as this masterclass of a show, we remember all of the good things about it, and all of its best moments. Because in our lizard brains, it triggers happy memories and endorphins. Those are the instant, subconscious emotions that get evoked. We forget all the nitty gritty details about episodes that were true travesties like Code of Honor, or all of the times Troi was physically and metaphorically assaulted, or all the times Geordi was a creep, or all the times TNG flagrantly disregarded TOS canon, or even its own events. We might know intellectually those things happened, but they don't affect our love for the show because we aren't looking at things rationally.
And just being mindful of that, and taking that perspective into the new shows, has really helped me better appreciate nuTrek for what it is. I made the mistake before of not giving older Star Trek shows fair shakes, I wasn't going to make that mistake again with nuTrek. So I go into each new Star Trek show, and while I will definitely notice how they aren't like the shows I grew up on and loved, or doesn't live up to certain expectations, I will sit and practice mindfulness and ruminate on those feelings and ask myself, "Are these feelings logical? Is this actually different, or is it just my perception? What is the show trying to do and say, and is that interesting in and of itself?" So take Discovery S3 as a case example.
There's a twist towards the end of the season that answers a season-long mystery. Without spoilers, I'd gander to say most people do not like the answers to that twist. My first and immediate gut reaction was one of confusion and quite honestly disgust. The season had built up such an interesting and compelling premise and the answer just seemed... lame. But was this a failing of the show? Were the writers stupid or something? What could they have done for an alternative answer that would have been more satisfying/interesting? Were the writers trying to say something specific with how this twist was answered that I'm not really giving them credit for? The more I thought about it in a detached and analytic way, the more things started to make sense to me, and the more I began to appreciate what they'd done. It didn't really make sense for the writers - who had done a really good job up to that point - to suddenly just become dumdums. I mean, it happens, but was this likely here? Not necessarily. Could I think of an alternative answer that would have been more interesting? Not really. The answer they thought up turned out to be pretty unique, and most TV shows would have settled for some lame techno-macguffin that was pretty devoid of meaning. And the more I thought out the scenario, and listened to interviews from the actors/writers/showrunners, it began to click with me what they were aiming for thematically. Which was actually a pretty potent moralistic theme the more I thought about it, that weaved its way into almost every single individual story arc that had been addressed in the season up to that point.
I still think the answer of Disco S3's mystery plot wasn't the best. But I'm not mad or disappointed about it. I see the merits and value of it, and actually appreciate it now. And after having just rewatched the season as of a day or two ago, I actually started considering additional layers of meaning that I don't think is coincidental and is actually kind of low key fantastic:
The entire Su'Kal story seems so silly at face value, but I'm pretty sure one part of it is that he's supposed to be a surrogate for angry nuTrek haters. He's a literal man-child, with stunted emotional growth and an inherent incapacity to relate to others or to even acknowledge the sentience and perspective of other people. He's trapped in a virtual world, and his wails of anguish and fear literally destroyed the Star Trek universe. Like, that can't be a massive coincidence, right? This kid is basically Superboy Prime. And it would have been really easy for Discovery to punch down at the stand-in for detractors of the show/terminally online haters. And yet, the characters in the show treat him with immense compassion and patience. They work hard to try and empathize with him, understand where he came from, find ways to communicate with him to put him at ease and help gradually open his mind to new ideas he steadfastly refused to confront. They see themselves in him, and put their lives on the line to help him, when it would have been much easier to simply fire a phaser at the guy. And when they do make the connection after multiple episodes of hard work, they're able to figure out what his hang ups were, to help him confront them and move past them through empathy, and begin to help him take the first steps into true adulthood and seeing the real world in all its marvel and majesty. And this ability to like, really, truly connect with others, feeds back into the entire literary theme of the whole season, and into Star Trek in general. Where connecting with one another is how we truly move forward and solve our problems with finality in order to reach the utopian vision of Star Trek. And it's not even done in a patronizing way either, the characters are just being themselves - good people doing their job and doing what comes natural to them.
Like, I don't know if the show was able to pull it off 100%, because clearly it didn't exactly land with most people (or even myself the first time around). But it's actually low key... amazing!? Like, actually peak Star Trek??? It was not just something nobody has really ever done before, but it took a risk to do so, and just really stuck to it guns to deliver its message. And like, I can't fault that. The more I think about it, the more it just really feels like a genuine spiritual successor. Like, S3 of Disco is the TMP of nuTrek. Flawed, but fascinating and really embodying the ethos of the franchise in unconventional and divisive, but ultimately laudable and commendable ways. And the message itself is a very commendable one, and not just in a "isn't that quaint" kind of way, but actually went through the effort to model to the audience how to actually carry out its morals rather than just telling you about them.