The Federation’s ban on AI and GE also has tinges of authoritarianism that run counter to the liberal ideal it’s supposed to represent. Say some planet in the Federation takes a different view of these issues, and wants to create a race of super-Datas and give them equal rights, are we expected to believe that the rest of the Federation will show up to bust down their doors, like some kind of space-DEA?

There seem to be three distinct post-Trek futures:

• genuine big shot actor
• reasonably successful voice actor
• B-movie “star”, featured prominently on the poster and appearing for 5 minutes in the actual movie.

At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.

Just as well, given the state of Trek movies by that time. DS9 was never ruined.

Yeah, and the problem with the Picard and Data show is that those characters don’t really have a relationship, at least not an emotional connection like Kirk/Spock/McCoy. They basically just had a professional relationship, which was fine for the series where there’s a problem to be solved every episode, and it’s not necessary to have fleshed-out character arcs. But a movie narrative needs to make the audience care about the main characters and their interactions with each other, all within a very short period of time. Picard/Data simply could not provide that emotional core.

Another important factor is TNG’s reliance (sometimes over-reliance) on A/B plots. The B plots were often an outlet for the ensemble characters to come out and play.

I think you can even argue that in each case there are two main characters plus a third wheel (Riker/McCoy).

But McCoy never faded from view, whereas Riker almost became a background character during the second half of TNG. They should have written Riker out of the series after Best of Both Worlds; after the character stuck around, the writers seemed unable to figure out what to do with him.