Will add that DS9 is the best Star Trek show for me, though I love TNG too, it's just to uneven overall.
What it proposes is a StarFleet that has lost and subverted most of its moral principles. It doesn't spend to much time on the "why", but it's not hard to imagine a number of reasons: giving in to convenience and political expediency, letting corrupt people into positions of power (which is basically a Star Trek trope) so on and so on. The show depicts the treatment of the robots as pretty fucked up, being treated like a joke by their peers. So I see this as an additional element in the story, it shows you how StarFleet has gone back on prior decisions. Perhaps the creator of these robots argues that they don't have a consciousness, like Data did, and made them generally dumber, and so it got a pass.
As for the Romulan Empire: My understanding is that this show takes place after Star Trek Nemesis. The Empire gets pretty fucked up in that show, the Senate blown away and presumably losing a number of their ships to Shinzon. It's possible they had long-term plans to mitigate the star going nova, but had to scramble to just survive all the stuff in Nemesis.
I feel Picard (the show) has a lot of interesting ideas, though it is quite unabashedly an overly "bleak" take on Star Trek, one that I can understand will piss of fans of the old Star Trek world.
But I feel it's just plain wrong to group it together with Discovery into just "New Trek". Discovery is dumb on whole other level.
So I will write some words to defend, and contextualise the Picard show.You like what you like.
Star Trek is a utopic show about a better mankind. One that prefers diplomatic solutions over violence but doesn't back off from a fight if necessary. Starfleet isn't a military organization; they are professional explorers, scientists, and diplomates. Overseen by a democratic, multispecies government.
There are bad apples though even in their own ranks and Starfleet gets confronted with many interesting challenges, space anomalies, war, greed and has sometimes a tough time to uphold its own high ethical standards. I'm not trying to sell TNG and DS9 to you here but believe me, but there are some fantastic episodes out there.
New Trek is everything but that. I'm not even sure what it wants to be after Picard, other than dystopian Trumpland 2.0 featuring the main plot from Mass Effect. New Trek doesn't want to be Star Trek. I think that's clear, but the writing and stories are not good enough to stand on their own. Bad dialogues, plot holes, and ideas that have not been thought out well.
For me, new Trek is dumped down space fantasy with bad writers. It has been botched in every conceivable way. Not able and willing to uphold the original vision, while being too incompetent to build something new At least the production values and flashy spectacles looked nice.
I take a good, original TNG Picard speech over the entire seasons of new Trek Picard any day. For example when Picard fought for Datas right to not be recreated. Because that's exactly what happened in TNG and StarFleet decided that creating a race of sacrificial androids doing labor is the same as enslavement. The writers of new trek Picard just forgot about that. They also forgot that the Romulan Space Empire is huge. They also forgot that many stars will eventually turn into super novas and that that's not something that happens spontaneously. It takes an exceptionally long time and the Romulan space empire would have had decades to evacuate their home system. Unless they are righteous idiots. But who cares about all that when you can have explosions and people screaming "that's the power of math", phasers, Picard dressing like a pimp and people getting their eyes cut out.
That's the power of bad writing. Hell, yeah!
What it proposes is a StarFleet that has lost and subverted most of its moral principles. It doesn't spend to much time on the "why", but it's not hard to imagine a number of reasons: giving in to convenience and political expediency, letting corrupt people into positions of power (which is basically a Star Trek trope) so on and so on. The show depicts the treatment of the robots as pretty fucked up, being treated like a joke by their peers. So I see this as an additional element in the story, it shows you how StarFleet has gone back on prior decisions. Perhaps the creator of these robots argues that they don't have a consciousness, like Data did, and made them generally dumber, and so it got a pass.
As for the Romulan Empire: My understanding is that this show takes place after Star Trek Nemesis. The Empire gets pretty fucked up in that show, the Senate blown away and presumably losing a number of their ships to Shinzon. It's possible they had long-term plans to mitigate the star going nova, but had to scramble to just survive all the stuff in Nemesis.
I feel Picard (the show) has a lot of interesting ideas, though it is quite unabashedly an overly "bleak" take on Star Trek, one that I can understand will piss of fans of the old Star Trek world.
But I feel it's just plain wrong to group it together with Discovery into just "New Trek". Discovery is dumb on whole other level.