I just don't get it. What is the freaking problem of those directors, trying to rewrite federation into some kind of dystopian tech fascism?
I was annoyed by the first Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams, with those police cops. I was alienated by those anti-android resentments in Picard. I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode, because the main protagonist was sent to some kind of labor prison for disobedience, where prisoners regularly die. I didn't think it could get any worse but just watching the first 10 minutes of Starfleet Academy makes me want to bury the whole franchise [edit: and stopped watching]. Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner. How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?
Star Trek is supposed to be the ONE fiction with a positive, utopian view on mankind and the future. I totally get the attraction of dystopian settings but for that I can read some Warhammer 40k novels. This really makes me furious.
Fortunately there is still Strange New Worlds.
Please spoiler me, when this bullshit in Starfleet Academy gets turned around in some twist, because otherwise I will just ignore the show.
Because from a literary and media standpoint, utopias are boring. The Federation has never been a utopia. It is a post scarcity society with utopian ideals, but with plenty of flaws to balance out those ideals. In the TOS era, those flaws included penal colonies, the death penalty, albeit for only one crime, contacting Talos IV and lots of infighting among member worlds.
Without conflict, there is no drama. Star Trek has long found conflict in pitting the Federation against less high-minded adversaries, the Klingons and Romulans, the Borg, the Cardassians and the Dominion, the Kazon, etc. That is fine but after 60 years it is also sort of played out.
To your point about Discovery, it's first season took place before the Federation's ideals were fully codified in policy - general order 1 had yet to become "the prime directive" for example.
TNG trek took place later and was closer to the utopian ideal. But still wasn't perfect. The Federation tried to force Data to undergo study as a guinea pig and tried to take his daughter from him for the same reason, they supported unaligned worlds against internal dissent and left untold numbers of Federation citizens to the mercy of the Cardassians in the interest of keeping the peace.
During the Dominion War, the Federation was fine with setting aside it's ideals as a matter of survival.
During the burn, the federation no longer had the resources to support it's high ideals so it shrank and degenerated. Now. It is on the ascendant again, able to right past wrongs.
I think there's still a lot of room to explore without abandoning the utopia setting. like we usually only see the spaceship stuff, but what about a more political drama taking place on member worlds, that kind of thing, i think it could be amazing.
also, as you say, it's been done for 60 years. Might as well do the same thing over again for a new generation that hasn't seen tos/tng/ds9. They don't know it yet, so it's not overused, and the TOS audience wouldn't be the target audience anyways. and could still explore new topics. the audience isn't the same, our world isn't the same, making the same show again would still not be boring as it be a completely different thing.
Both approaches can work imo and have a place, without the need to go more dystopia.
My point is that there never was a utopian setting. Utopia's are perfect by definition and therefore boring. The Federation is something much more interesting than a utopia. It's an imperfect culture that aspires to better itself in the attempt to achieve utopian ideals. That it fails and tries again is part of what makes Star Trek interesting.