The problems with the Star Trek variants are many, but here's a couple.
1) Bad guys never get their asses kicked. They get scolded or accidentally kill themselves, but there's never a complete butt-stomping. In the two Elite Force games, the first starts off with a bunch of large battles in which no one is hurt on either side, and the second has a villain launch genocidal attacks against multiple planets, you attack and KILL his henchmen, but the main villain himself is told the error of his ways. Creating a dark atmosphere requires more than just turning down the lights.
2) Oprahfication, everything is about how the main characters feel. Star Trek is about us, but usually aspects of us being played out by others while we watch the crew try to understand the aliens (us). This use of aliens and technology to give us a distanced view of ourselves was dropped after the first show. Everything is a grand conspiracy of evil humans, the aliens are misunderstood victims of our own evilness, and storylines revolve around how the main characters deal with their guilt for being human (or human-like). For example, on the new show, Enterprise, there was an
episode in which they found an alien race which practiced slavery. The captain scolded one of his crewmen for being too ethnocentric and opposing alien slavery. The captain then echoed the
Dred Scott decision and refused a slave's asylum request. Humans have to be the villains, even if it means an open endorsement of slavery.
So why are people
trying to keep this thing going? Television being what television is, there's already a half-dozen space shows, and more will be coming. Why don't they put that money into trying to make something better instead of keeping that franchise on life support?
Goe, against slavery and the francification of the Klingon Empire.