Maybe Pike keeps the ship’s environmental settings a little colder than the others, so nobody wants to free the knees

I dunno about nobody considering the recuring background andorians (give me slim blue men in skimpy minidresses you cowards!/s) clearly 23rd century fabric just breathes really well.

I see what you're talking about, and don't want to see them play so fast and loose with the notion as to take old noteworthy's and heroships out of mothballs, triple the volume and call it a "refit" for nostalgia bait. But Trek does offer an interesting notion here that we don't really have in real life in that there are core valuable parts of a ship more important and possibly more enduring than its hull. We don't take reactors out of old aircraft carriers and submarines and drop them in new ships as some sort of legacy so the idea that it could arguably be done in star trek is novel.

Obviously the Neo-Connie space frame is a new build due to its size but I don't see how that stops them from reusing the warp core, warp coils, computer core, etc.

I'd take up that wager they used the same actor for zefram cochrane to do the traditional new series handoff, they cast him as involved in the NX-01's multi decade development program before he disappeared.

Except total unaltering is impossible you can put the big history book events back into place (ie zefram cochrane invented the human iteration of warp drive) but the butterflies are still set loose (ie zefram cochrane was told about the enterprise-E by time travelers and was shown it through a telescope in order to gain his trust and cooperation, a century later a hitherto unmentioned ship of the same name and rough silhouette would be launched supplanting Dauntless as the name associated with the NX-01 registry.) Our time travelers don't notice the differences when they return home because they are so far removed from the altered events that the fog of history essentially covers things up.

You're moving the goalposts asking for such explicits beyond what is reasonable. Why would they need to spell it out for you in an interview when they have the actors say "these events weren't supposed to happen" repeatedly on screen? Are all viewers expected to familiarize themselves with every entertainment news article around and about a film or TV show in order to understand it? These things should be intuitive, and if what is intuitive isn't the writer's intent then that's just a failure on the writer's part.

This timeline is Altered not Alternate They did the same thing for First Contact, and ENT add just enough time travel to excuse not making the show into a history documentary yet none the less its considered part of the same story as everything that was made before but came later in the timeline.

Lower decks had a

There's these things called "stars" most planets with life on them have them very close by in the cosmic scale of things, and if you look up pictures of the ISS under one you'll see it's actually quite bright...

For me, having them look like TNG Klingons doesn’t even solve the problem because ENT had implied that shouldn’t happen until the TOS movie era. They could have rendered explicit the implication that not every Klingon was infected by the virus, but that still doesn’t support making the Klingons look how they did in s1 DIS.

Folks forget the klingon's made that Augment virus which then got loose in a lab breach. If they could do that to themselves on accident imagine what they'd do to themselves on purpose to try and compensate as the implications of the augment virus turn thier society upside down. There's much I don't like about Disco Klingons but the face redesign intrigued me as a potential reaction and over correction to the augment arc in ENT, and how past exchanges like that ultimately lead to federation vs klingon hostilities. Unfortunately Disco didn't capitalize on this probably cause if they start explaining things they'd ultimately have to admit they can't get away with haveing the longest heroship in canon...

While I welcome the more flexible interpretation of TOS visuals to make a world that is more immersive and functional while still keeping the color, and perceived campiness, I'd draw a hard line against making a genuine "Re-TOS" as it were. The idea of overwriting, or demoting old performances strikes me as a path to perpetual reboots and origin story retellings like we see with comic book superhero's, and seems a tad rude to trek's own past and how it got here.

Its also pretty unnecessary, folks often talk about how they want to see the old stories updated for a modern audience, but its often the case that the same stories have been retold with different characters and places already throughout trek's subsequent series, and as a result we are flush with ways to retell TOS's hit scenarios without crossing that line. Naked Time(TOS) vs Naked Now(TNG) vs Singularity(ENT) would be a commonly cited example, and we even already saw SNW demonstrate one such way to go about this with "a quality of mercy" a time traveling what-if reimagining of "balance of terror" had pike been captain and not kirk.

I accept and expect paramount to still be making at least one show set in the 23rd century for as long as SNW and its successors do well, but these should be used to look forward and expand on the time period not backwards at where we've already gone before.

ENT era.

Externally speaking Starfleet ships march to the beats of NACA/NASA X-planes, Klingon embrace a very soviet yet alien look in contrast, Vulcans look advanced and sleek yet ancient and mythical with the biggest pointiest toys on the block.

Internally speaking construction is depicted as having limits, tech and interfaces are familiar to real world, cramped ship like rooms are the norm, and there's no handwaving over how everything might fit inside the ships.