We’re in a country adding 11 thousand foodstamp recipients a day. We’re no where near solving poverty. There’s still plenty of China that is a dirt-poor cesspool, and other parts that are just a cesspool.
A lot of poverty has to do with a lack of effort and poor decision making. This is where replicators do a good job of solving it, even the habitually lazy can get their needs fulfilled, of course there’s a necessary socialist element in there too. But replicator kind of make that necessary, in a society where all basic needs are provided by a magic box a lot of jobs become unnecessary.
I didn’t denigrate traders. Just pointed out they’re a large chunk of the civilian population we encounter in TOS. It should be noted though that most of the traders we encounter in TOS aren’t entrepreneurs so much as bored people looking for some fun.
There was a comma there, space hippies and Mudd separate people. Both of which were basically lay abouts.
Some things are constant. You mentioned the physics of transporters, well the physics of transporters is that converting mass to energy and back again requires vast quantities energy, all of the energy in the sun. That’s not going to change. Now we might find another source for that energy, the magical dilithium crystals, but the quantity of energy needed doesn’t change, just the availability. Which goes a long way to explain why warp core breaches are so catastrophic. But until we find unobtanium transporters are a magic box.
In the end it’s entertainment. Movies are there to entertain the masses. JJ-ST entertained the masses, and scored a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It did the job. And here you are still complaining about it years later, so much for the being forgotten part.
The big problem is there’s that chunk of fen that treat Trek like a religion. They were willing to put up with a lot of bad Trek (which really makes up the majority of the old timeline stuff) because it kept paying lip service to some ideal Roddenberry put forth, always of course carefully ignoring the fact that Roddenberry was kind of an SOB, and that a lot of what made TOS awesome came from a different Gene entirely (Gene L Coon who actually is the guy that wrote a lot of the deep scripts people point to, and gave us Klingons). But they deified Roddenberry, and studiously ignored how painfully boring the Trek he did without Coon was (first 3 season of TNG, the “no conflict” years), and ignored how the best Trek movie was based on a Coon character (yeah he wrote Space Seed and gave us Khan). Which has a lot to do with why I like JJ-ST, there’s a lot more Coon in it, it’s a lot more exciting, the bad guys are bad, and the bridge crew get to argue with each other.