Yeah someone being non-binary or whatever and no one caring or commenting on it at all is a lot more progressive and meaningful. TOS did that really well with Uhura on the bridge. She was a black woman and absolutely no one on the ship acted like that was remotely odd. It sent a very powerful message.
It also felt like it was shoehorning in all the progressiveness for the sake of being progressive which sends the exact opposite message than they hoped for. The crew was so amazingly diverse representing so many different things that any adult would look at it and go “the odds of all these different sexualities/etc. being on one ship at once are so improbable as to be impossible.” That makes it feel like pandering, not being progressive. That could work for kids, just being able to see someone like them on screen helps a lot, but Discovery is very much not meant for kids to watch.
Basically they tried too hard and didn’t understand what they were doing.
All of them hold up pretty well when binging them, although I do fairly slow binges, maybe watching 3 - 4 episodes a day at most. There are episodes I dislike and I simply skip those when binging, which helps a lot. (For example DS9 is my favorite Trek but I really, really hate Vedik/Kai Wynn and skip the earlier episodes where she’s being an annoying removed. I do watch the later episodes where she’s a lot more important, but I still hate her character so much. For TNG I skip all of season 1 and most of season 2.)
Back when Enterprise was airing some fan took the opening video and put it to an instrumental instead of the song and it was awesome as hell. Really wish I’d saved a copy of that now.
The scenes in the isolation chamber in underwear applying gel to each other were totally unnecessary and unpleasant to watch, especially nowadays. They have aged very poorly.
Back when Enterprise was airing some fan took the opening footage and added instrumental music to it instead and it was soooooo much better. Worked wonderfully. Really wish I’d saved a copy of it, because I can’t find it anymore.
It was more like this one where they use an instrumental version of the opening theme, but as I recall the music was more along the lines of Voyager’s opening theme.