Star Trek Social Club

This is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.

When being a "space military", Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a "space military".

Observe:

In the episode, Siege of AR-558, the Feds are defending a subspace relay behind cover, in an entrenched position with only one approach through a choke point and are getting the absolute SHIT kicked out of them. THIS IS A SOLVED PROBLEM. We solved it in the 19th century. The solution is a machine gun. Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.

In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?

Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?

Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?

Letting Rick Burman run rampant for years

Khan Noonien Singh has never been portrayed by an actor of the character's ethnicity, nor have any of his descendants.

Life support. It's always hilarious to me when power going out to life support is treated as an instantly fatal threat. IIRC, if you actually do the calculation it's ridiculous. If you combine the interior volume of the Enterprise D with its crew count, you would find that the life support system could be offline for MONTHS before the oxygen levels started to substantially drop.

The lack of racial diversity for the empires outside of the Federation makes it feel like somehow only the Federation ever figured out how to work with others. Even problematic caste style situations do not come up enough, let alone just simple variations of races.

The most "diverse" other empire is somehow the Dominion. We know the other empires have other races in them as well. It's such a Federation centric view of the universe and I feel that it reinforced my America centric mindset because the parallels seem so direct to me. We are diverse, everyone else is easily groupable into divided others. Only we are Free. Only we are willing to work together.

I will preface this comment with I know the reasons why the show is like this, but still bugs me when I watch.

1. The number of issues that could have been prevented by having some kind of protective suit are huge. Isolate from toxins, bacteria, viruses. It would have made for some very short episodes.

2. Having any kind of idea about real security. Every visitor to the ship has almost free reign to go anywhere and do anything. The computer can be accessed by anyone. You can just wander onto the bridge. No lockouts in any equipment, including things that are critical to crew and ship survival.

It would ruin the concept, so I get why they don't tackle the topic, but:

The federation, particularly humanity inside of the federation, is run by essentially a military government. There are elections, probably, we never really get to see them, and the decision making process of the admirals is not shown to the viewer, for world building and story telling reasons. The admirals are the problem posers, the calls to adventure, the exposition. "Go there, do this, top secret, very important, blah blah".

They don't do misuse them in lore, that much, but even the lesser capable space ships are enormously dangerous. If I recall correctly, there are even some mentions of not being regularly allowed to warp inside solar system boundaries. The risk of misuse or accidents is unimaginable. I'm pretty sure humanity has resigned itself to being ruled by some admiralty board that could order to vaporize the planet. They're not going to do that, but the implication is certainly... looming.

I also really don't like how they changed styles after the 80s/90s series. The perceived need to reinvent themselves has yielded mostly bad results. Only "Strange New Worlds" is tolerable, because it's well done, but it's still "too much" in my opinion. The special effects are nice, but there was no need to design corridors like that.

Same for uniforms. Look at how much "the suit" has changed since the 1870s. Barely at all.

Change.

Star Trek seems to be allergic to any deviation from the status quo. Everything forward must be recognisable to the past, whereas reality is not like that. Everything has to look recognisable, and be recognisable, even when it doesn't make sense.

Everything has to have impulse, warp drive, for example, or engines that make it behave much the same. All the alien ships work like that, even centuries into the future, when that makes no sense at all. There has to be a Federation.

There's very rarely any sort of major lasting change that we see on-screen, and I think what Star Trek needs is that growth.

Star Trek's biology also tends to be infamously awful. It's always played fast and loose with it, arguably more so than a lot of the other scientific disciplines it covers.

Barclay's Cold Virus cure causing Worf to devolve into a precursor species, and several of the crew to evolve into hybrid creatures just because it altered the introns and exons. Doing that doesn't automatically turn you into something else, or else radiation would be far worse than it is.

Same for the Klingon redundant organs. It's still the same system, so the Klingon redundancies wouldn't do much good, unless they had something on their planet that meant they needed it, that isn't just being a fighter planet.

And it doesn't really address the physiological differences very well. A human and a Klingon hit the same, and have much of the same vulnerabilities. Worf has slight super-strength, but that's about it.

Flirting. Everyone who flirts (especially on TNG) sounds like an LMM trained on HR handouts.

1st seasons

edit I misread, these are minor things. My actual answer is Star Trek has never put enough women in decision making positions in the creation of Star Trek and all of Star Trek's success is despite that.

Seven of Nine was generally poorly handled. From the problems of the "Born Sexy Yesterday" trope, to the male crew members hitting on her. To her costume, and the various bad mothering choices of Janway. To the face that she was so beautified.

I would have preferred her to remain grotesquely Borg for a couple of seasons and slowly be rehabilitated.

not sure if this has been discussed by the actresses or anyone familiar with the behind scenes situation, but what was with casting a chinese-american and korean-american as japanese women? given the how the imperial aspirations of japan had such a brutalizing affect on those nations, i still find this culturally tone deaf. why did the characters have to be japanese?

referring, of course to keiko o'brien and hoshi sato.

Booker.

Why have Starfleet rules when you just have a dude on your ship that you can call on that just shits on the rules.

And it's not Mariner-style twisting or bending the rules it's just complete skirting of them

Irish stereotypes. From Finnigan in TOS all the way to "Up The Long Ladder" in TNG... It hasn't been great.

Code of Honor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)) had some issues and wasn't consistent with Roddenberry's concept of the Star Trek universe.

All...of Chakotay. Yes, I know that con artist got hired to give them tips but jeez, I'd change that if I could.