TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Man, people clown on George Lucas when he's left without constraints, but he's got nothing on Roddenberry except that the OT hit big enough that we got to see it. Roddenberry was deeply involved in the story of TPM, including the novelization.

My name is James Tiberius Kirk. Kirk because my father and his male forebears followed the old custom of passing along a family identity name. I received James because it was both the name of my father's beloved brother as well as that of my mother's first love instructor [insert Spock raised eyebrow here]. Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel. This is not trivial information. For example, the fact that I use an old-fashioned male surname says a lot about both me and the service to which I belong. Although the male-surname custom has become rare among humans elsewhere, it remains a fairly common thing among those of us in Starfleet. We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us. We submit ourselves to starship discipline because we know it is made necessary by the realities of deep-space exploration. We are proud that each of us has..."

And so it goes. The basic premise is that the enlightened Starfleet officers we all know and love are actually philosophical luddites and prudes, semi-exiled from earth because space is the only place their weird attitudes offer any value to human society. Not a terrible concept, really and one that other sci-fi has explored to varying degrees, but way weirder than anything collaboratively-produced Star Trek would imply, and reading between the lines it sounds like Roddenberry is almost apologizing for what Star Trek had to be in order to get made at all.