I'm sorry I completely disagree. You're right about the characters being very appealing yeah that is indisputable, heck if you wanted to criticize you can go even far in the opposite direction and say at the worst of times the "traditional" Trek main cast are all very clearly stereotypes.

But in general despite the characters appeal that is was far from the complete extent of it. There is a lot you can reference and go back to, from real actual technical manuals to the old Trek forum, the old websites some of which still exist.

The Enterprise-D is probably the most developed "character" out of any fiction franchise, I'm willing to bet the amount of detail around that ship would easily crack top 100, maybe top 20 in all of western fiction.

50 years later and they're still printing Illustrated handbooks of the ships e.g Star Trek: The U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 Illustrated Handbook. You can find VR models from 10 years ago on YT. Trek shit was at the front of 90s PC media with games, you can guess why. Its a huge overlap with the white male middle class of the time.

The fandom always wanted and craved for the highly intellectual and technical shit. But this is exactly the problem and dilemma for producers(B&B and then Kurtzman), this is what the old fans want but not what the general audience wants.

Its why a lot of libs and normal people are not really bothered by nuTrek but the old fandom hates it. Why? Yeah as you said nuTrek is exactly that, its character driven, STD is literaly about MB only, its emotional, it leads to fanfics etc.

The old fans absolutely hate that shit so to say that old trek was just character appeal? Yeah no.