UlyssesT

I know the brand/studio reasons, but all I can come up with for in-setting lore reason is that Mirandas require less resources/crew/maintenance, but it still seems like a sharp contrast between the service lives of both ships where, as far as I can tell, the Excelsior-class may have required more resources/crew/maintenance and that judging by size and a history of jankiness alone (I love the ship, I really do, but it's still an in-setting thing) and even the Constellation seemed to be kept around at least a little longer than the Constitution.

Anyone got any sources about this that make it feel justified besides the studio/suits deciding "we don't want audiences to confuse anything on screen for the TMP refit" ?

Though to be fair there might be enough dirt for @Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net

By that, I mean when an old and dormant franchise tries to reboot itself (often, again) and even if the new film (or show) has some success, it's largely forgotten over time compared to what it was intended to be rebooting.

It's actually hard for me to narrow down on a few specific examples of the lost-to-obscurity outright failed reboots, but did you know Rollerball (the 70s movie) had a post-2000s reboot? That's one example.

Disney has a habit of making live-action reboots of old animated films they gave a dull "reality" treatment to and most of them are already forgotten compared to the cartoons they came from.

Spider-Man's been rebooted so many times they made a movie about the rebooting! The "middle children" of those reboots seem to only exist as footnotes already.

No one seems to have asked for Scooby Doo's latest reboot (which is just an edgy nepo baby that removed Scooby Doo from Scooby Doo and wanted to turn Velma into a personal avatar) and while suits keep it going for now, it's not likely to be remembered either.

I even saw this happen with Prometheus and its sequel, which were not quite reboots but did retcon a lot of known lore, such as the outright stupid "real" origin of the Xenomorphs and the fate of the Space Jockeys that was so forgettable that I don't even remember its name. Alien(s) is still discussed, and those are not so much.

Similar deal with the Star Wars Disney Trilogy, which while technically not reboots functionally were because Abrams doesn't play well with other people's toys and had to kill/blow up most things that had been built up before he showed up so his "soft reboot" could happen. Come to think of it, the 2009 Trek film series had a similar issue.

Is there anything out there to discuss this "new and shiny and maybe even profitable reboot fades into irrelevance" phenomenon?

Mine is that the early 2000s fad of being "half-something" in fantasy fiction, usually to get the cool powers but have less or none of the drawbacks, was symptomatic of the salad-bar-like purchasing of identity markers that Francis Fukuyama claimed that people worldwide would happily purchase and mix and match in his "end of history" that ostensibly was to reign over us forevermore. The fad seemed to fade around the time the "end of history" facade crumbled and history clearly began marching on.

I got nothing like evidence to back that up, but having experienced the time, and having argued with dozens of people in fiction and tabletop roleplaying and even LARPing circles about their "half vampire that has no real vampire downsides but all the cool vampire stuff" or their "half demon half angel half dragon half vampire" template stacks in 3.X D&D and so on and so on. Even so-called "Grey" Jedi in the Star Wars Fandom come to mind with the desire to have Dark Side powers but avoid drawbacks and negative labeling (the Jedi Order were space cops that kidnapped and indoctrinated children for a colonial power but that's another issue entirely).

The template stackers, both in freeform storytelling and in dice-driven games, had similar goals to neoliberalism: get ahead, pick up appealing labels, dodge unappealing labels, escape liability, win win win win.

I'm not saying that those people were willing or even knowing ideological adherents to neoliberalism's victory lap, but that the fad of picking as many identity markers as possible in a superficial power-seeking way was like a microcosm of larger societal issues of alienation, isolation, and ultimately unexamined dissatisfaction with worsening material conditions all around us.

A much more recent symptomatic example I can think of regarding a similar phenomenon is cryptocurrency believers thinking they can out-grift the grifts of conventional capitalism and leave all the "wagecucks" behind by holding onto the correct grifting token. Like the above example, it's a fantasy (if a more expensive one with more living consequences) of being powerful in a world that drains us of our power and gives it to the already powerful.

Like I said, weird take, but I do believe it even if I lack proof and can't be bothered to do a dissertation on the topic.

I don't know what else to say about this except that "thin blue line" flags should be seen the same way as swastikas if they weren't seen that way before.