Maybe instead of "utopia" I should've said "as close to utopia as you can get without shattering your suspension of disbelief". The world was designed as a reachable utopia, and in my eyes, the vision didn't decay fast enough when Roddenbery left the scene to be lost by the time of ENT.
> While, as noted above, it's flawed even then, it really doesn't work for DS9, VOY, or ENT.
Compared to what? Relative to pretty much every other show, I think it worked really well. The baseline is still visibly much more idealistic than everything else (including post-ENT Star Trek).
> The baseline is still visibly much more idealistic than everything else (including post-ENT Star Trek).
Picard, specifically, seems to differ from late TNG or DS9 not so much in the degree to which the Federation is or is not a utopia, but in that the focal characters are (at least initially, the arc if season one seems to have most of them evolving in the direction of more conventional ST focal characters) in places that would only have been occupied by non-focal characters.
(“Starfleet is doing bad things because it's upper echelons have been infiltrated by outsiders with an agenda that is, at least in chosen methods if not goals, anthithetical the the ideals towards which the Federation strives” is not inconsistent with the degree of idealism in TNG.)
> While, as noted above, it's flawed even then, it really doesn't work for DS9, VOY, or ENT.
Compared to what? Relative to pretty much every other show, I think it worked really well. The baseline is still visibly much more idealistic than everything else (including post-ENT Star Trek).