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Discuss this article by @Thande here
As you may have gathered from some of the titles above, the Star Trek fandom in this era was a bit obsessed with Spock, to put it mildly
This isn’t great, although it’s still a heck of a lot better than how DS9 would eventually resolve it.
That's an interesting argument, though it does go against @Makemakean 's thesis about all Roddenberry's decisions being negativeIn his Roddenberry biography, Lance Parkin argues part of TNG's "no bringing back old stuff like Vulcans" edict was to break that connection between Spock and Star Trek, so it would no longer be as dominated by this one character played by one actor - because then it's not All Gene's Vision. (Which in the long run ends up being the healthier decision for the franchise)
That's an interesting argument, though it does go against @Makemakean 's thesis about all Roddenberry's decisions being negative
As a broader comment I think a Mirror Universe type idea can work well (though there are issues with the Discovery take as you mention) and DS9's biggest problem is insisting on it being the same Mirror Universe.
That one's interesting because it starts with 'what if Kirk screwed up in an older story', but the screwup is 'what if the Terrans being less nasty is BAD', and the specific thinking by the writer was: "Empires aren't usually brutal unless there's a reason. There are usually external or internal pressures that cause them to be that way. So I just thought that if the parallel Earth was that brutal, there had to be a reason. And the reason was that the barbarians (the Klingons and the Cardassians) were at the gate."
And that's a bit suspicious as reasoning, especially from the Mirrorverse we actually saw - they clearly weren't worried about an enemy empire coming for them at any moment. A 'nicer' Terran Empire would also just be a more grumpy Starfleet, who manage fine at holding back Cardassians and (sometimes depending on plot) Klingons. It makes more sense if you assume the Terran threat caused the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance (IIRC some comics do go with that) and thus created its own eventual downfall.