Daystrom Institute

This issue was best left to Worf’s lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.

IMO, that was pushing the line as it was, since it still implies a distinct visual difference. It would have been better for Worf to use TOS-style make-up, and misdirect the remark as referring to the uniform instead or something along those lines.

It’s really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.

TOS, I think, generally gets a pass because it's considered a relic of the 1960s, whereas the whole TNG-era was when Trek made it big, and they more or less defined the visual aspects for a lot of the franchise. If you talk about starships, people generally think you're talking around the time of TNG, not TOS, or 32nd century Discovery.

Animation, meanwhile, gets a pass both because they're not quite as big, and that any differences can be dismissed as stylistic alterations made to suit the medium. People didn't care that TAS made tribbles neon pink, instead of the more realistic fur colours that their real-life counterparts had.

The most fuss, in my experience, really tends to happen when a visual alteration is thought of as being a retroactive change that "ruins" the existing image someone might have of something. Discovery's Klingons and Enterprise get some controversy because there was already an Enterprise and Klingons around that time in-universe, and the new design is taken as replacing the old thing.

By comparison, the Enterprise suddenly changing in TMP, or in TNG accepted not as replacements, but as being spurred by technological development, like with phasers/transporters being massively different. Or, that the change/original characters were minor enough that it's not considered significant. There wasn't a spat over Discovery's revision of the Saurians, since the only prior depiction was as a background character in TMP, and in DS9, Trill/Ferengi were only shown a small handful of times, so changing them was accepted quite well.

Personally, what I also find interesting, is what things people don't question not changing. Like starships using the exact same technology in the exact same way, for 300 -- 900 years. No-one building the human ships in the Federation has thought to significantly change the warp nacelle design, either based on the engine designs of other species, or just to shift it around a bit in all that time? No Vulcan inspiration, different successful engine technology, etc?

It's only been 100 years since we invented the auto-motive car, and we've already had variants of them for decades that aren't just changing the wheel count, or making them slightly fancier. It seems weird that the Federation, for all its technological prowess and allegedly superiority by co-operation, has barely touched them for all that time, and that everything remains separate and species-linked. You'd expect at least one Federation space-vessel that does have mixed technologies, and a human framework to put them all together into a functional whole.