I'm suspicious that this may be an age-related thing.
To those of us who grew up watching TOS - when it was the only Star Trek around - we thought of the series as a "how the future should be" kind of thing. It gave people hope - hope that this stupid Cold War that had us all scared to death would turn very, very hot would actually pass and we would be able to go out, explore the universe and boldly go, etc.
Yeah, the Klingons and the Romulans were ersatz Russians and Chinese. I know that. I also know that the Vulcans were, in some manner. an analogy to the Japanese. Rodenberry was a humanist, but had leanings towards Buddhism and Taoism. He believed that the human spirit would eventually win out over hatred.
Obviously, the generations that came after Star Trek hit the big screen for the first time only saw the caricatures of what Star Trek was - the fanfics, the cosplays, the jokes about Spock's ears and Shatner's rug, "Dammit, Jim!" and "Beam me up, Scotty." But what was lost in all the noise was what Star Trek was supposed to be about: optimism.
Yes, Spock in the original series lost a lot. The whole Reunification arc on TNG was fantastic (and appropriate, since Mark Lenard was in failing health). But to have a secondary plotline from Nemesis basically nuke all of Vulcan on a (relatively) flimsy premise? Oh, joy. Just what we always wanted: Emo-Spock.
And Kirk - look, I know Shatner hammed him up. His acting got parodied so much because HE WAS THE FREAKIN' MAIN CHARACTER. The whole story of "Wagon Train to the Stars" was based on that leader, boldly going and all that. And despite the characterization, he was a leader. Yes, he did things unconventionally at times, but he was more along the lines of the quote by the Dalai Lama: "Learn the rules completely so that you may break them properly." He didn't just go off and break the Prime Directive for the lulz, like Abrams had him do in Into Darkness. He always had a reason: previous contamination, absolutely no choice, they needed the whales. The character we have now is a carouser who'd be more likely to not even make it past his first year at the Academy, let alone be granted command of a starship. And the way that ID went, it was like, "Hey, let's reverse the roles of Kirk and Spock from TWOK, and see if anyone notices!" Guess what, JJ: we did.
It's already been mentioned about Bones. The Doctor was way, way, WAY more than just a paranoid luddite. I blame the bad original cut of ST:TMP for that. McCoy was the ego to Spock's id, and Kirk was the superego. The three of them were what really made the show - and what made the Enterprise successful.
The triad was the general formula for all iterations of ST prior to the reboot. TNG started off with Picard/Riker/Troi, then became Picard/Riker/Data, and then - as the series began to evolve - it became more of an ensemble production. But the ship was always Picard's. DS9 had Sisko, Dax and Kira. Voyager had Janeway, Chakotay and Paris. Enterprise had Archer, Tucker and T'Pol. But all of them were shadows of Kirk, Spock and McCoy.
When Abrams did that temporal shift, he threw out decades - DECADES - of storylines and history and character development, just so he could use special effects and "inject life" into a series that was seen as "out of touch." Maybe what he should have done was go back and watch every single episode of all five series.
Instead, we got the STU version of "Hey, what if we killed off Obi-Wan instead of Qui-Gon Jin in Episode I?"
Just like Khan missing the target on the Genesis planet, Abrams missed what Star Trek was - and could be again, if done right.
