Telika: and, probably above all, the teleportation-based technology (a terrible plot device).
kalirion: Huh? What's wrong with teleportation-based technology?
Too random, too "open", too easy, convenient. Anyone can appear or disappear at anytime, or be brought from one place to the other when scenaristically seen fit. I'm overjoyced that Piccard got borged and all, but the way it happens feels cheap (*blink* oh he's gone bye - wait why don't we all just do this to each others all the time). These things happen too often in the stories, and I can't stand this in FPS games either, as an excuse for enemy spawning. Maybe I just don't get the rules and limitations (although I wikied), but it seems too loose to me, and allows for too many things. Plus, I like objects, shuttles, and material issues. (I'm even sad about the devastating blow that mobile phones have inflicted upon cold war spy stories - you know, where finding a phone booth in time could be a whole dramatic challenge.)
And don't get me started on holodecks !
Avogadro6: You summed up pretty well what I like about it. :) I think even adults need to dream, and Star Trek is a rather positive take on mankind's future, which is all too rare in fiction nowadays. The naivety only reinforces that. To each their own, but it baffles me that you like SW better, since it's even more cheesy and childish.
Star wars is childish in the unapologetic indiana jones sense. I don't mind that. It's less cheesy, because most aliens dare too be shaped (slightly) more differently than like a painted human (with a plastic nose at best), because costumes are a bit less "space cloth of the future", and stuff are generally more humane, dusty, rusty, nostromo-y than in star trek. It's a space age I van more easily relate to ane believe in. And, indeed, it's much less positive. Star trek is a bit too utopian and self-flattering, with the idea of mankind having evolved to a perfectly fair and enlightened society of diversity and tolerance - a diversity and tolerance that always struck me as the right for everybody on earth to be a heterosexual american, an enlightment that always freaks me out with its naive positivism and implied universality. I find star trek's underlying philosophy and vision of mankind a bit outdated, self-centered, pretentious, and vaguely colonialist - like all the exotic adventures where the western white goes to teach advance moral values to all the primitives, and impresses them all with his superior selflessness (if not humility). You know, flash gordon teaching aliens how humans are (like colonial heroes teaching foreigners how american are - "ach sie amerikanische alfayz zee humour i atmire zat, tötet ihn"). Star trek strikes me as some sort of deliberately flattering mirror, and this aspect makes me uneasy. Star wars is more anarchic. Its main heroes are losers (an amoral smuggler, and an immature would-be-knight), and its ideals are incarnated by a lost mystical order, not by the existing institutions. I breathe better in that universe.
Plus, it's all about civilians. I get easily tired by "commandant", "sir yes sir", kind of relationships. You know, for me, the antithesis of Star trek is the modern Doctor Who. It's blatantly antimilitaristic, it's chaotic, it incarnates some ideal that gets brutally questionned when too self-assured, it glorifies humanity in a way that juggles with its qualities and flaws in a clever, tender, ironical way. And it gives me a much lesser impression of uniformity. And it's marvellously cheesy aswell.
There, I don't know if this helps pinpoint my gripes, or what makes star trek not speak to me. Maybe there's simply too much order and respect for institutions and hierarchies for me, in star trek's utopia.
