M’Benga still wears blue. Chapel wears white, but she’s also a civilian contractor in SNW and hasn’t joined Starfleet yet, so how her uniform color interacts with everyone else is unclear.

Ro was basically on probation in her first appearance or two, IIRC. Uniform modifications are allowed at the discretion of the officer’s CO, and Ro was already in something of a disciplinary thing, so forbidding modifications makes some sense.

While the earring is typically religious and she may have been able to argue for reasonable accomodation on those grounds, Ro specifically wears it on the left ear, which is considered a secular way to show familial heritage while also indicating you don’t follow the Bajoran faith.

That phaser is shockingly detailed for its size.

My take is that nobody will care if you are bald, but with all their tech you can have as much or as little hair as you want. It’s an aesthetic choice that’s entirely yours, and no matter what you pick it’s not going to really attract attention. I mean, who’s going to care about your hair when you live next to a temporally displaced Klingon veterinarian and work with a guy who once got to be Q for a day? And even that is just kind of normal?

They could always bring back Touchstone to compensate.

They couldn’t get Chao or Meaney quite as frequently as everyone else because of their film careers. I know with Meaney they really wanted to show off his acting skills when they had him and determined that he portrayed suffering really well, so O’Brien suffered a lot. I think Keiko’s problem was that she was only in a couple episodes per season and the focus was typically on whatever horror was happening to Miles that week. She’s not so much a bad wife as a barely present side character.

I can definitely buy Sisko as a king under the mountain figure, believed by the Bajorans to return in their hour of greatest need, like Arthur for the British.

The wormhole / Celestial Temple seems to be extradimensional in some way. They might actually be out of Q’s reach. Or they might not. Q’s powers are vaguely defined.

I mean, we’ve still got authors typing up manuscripts on mechanical typewriters and GRRM writing ASOIAF on a DOS computer. Jake wanting to use a pen is possibly one of the least weird things about Trek tech.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 34985938479 times…

Majel Barret shows up in season 3 as Lady Morella.

I think they technically say that Vulcans don’t lie, not that Vulcans can’t lie. That would imply that they prefer to avoid it, but can if they need to. I mean, if Tuvok couldn’t lie then he never would have been able to go under cover as a member of the Maquis.

More or less. If you’re paying attention to what’s going on around you you’ll notice other traffic stop before your light turns green. There’s also typically a second or two where all lights are red before one turns green to make sure the intersection is clear.

and they certainly treated specific items as “valuable” (historical items, weapons, and especially liquor.)

Historical items definitely have non-monetary value. They can’t truly be replaced since, no matter how accurate the replica, only the one chair will be the Enterprise-A’s captain’s chair, for example. Replicators have software restrictions on what you can make with them, so you can’t just replicate weapons under normal circumstances, which creates scarcity and gives them value. Starfleet replicators also seem to be restricted from creating alcohol, which means most of the characters we see can only get it on shore leave, which also creates scarcity and therefor value. Alcohol is probably significantly less scarce when sourced through civilian replicators. The ones on DS9 are programmed with Starfleet’s restrictions, though.

DS9 is a Bajoran station, not a Federation one. The Bajoran economy is not post-scarcity and still runs on money. Either Starfleet officers get a stipend to purchase things when posted on such assignments, or Quark simply bills Starfleet. Either way, Starfleet/the UFP likely has a reserve of latinum and other resources for trade with other nations.

Vulcans as a whole, or at least Vulcan leadership, definitely seem to lean toward caution and a dash of fear. ENT showed a lot of this with how the pre-Federation Vulcan government reacted to Earth’s rapid technological advancement.

Individually, they seem to vary a lot. Spock and T’Lyn have goals they use logic to both choose and achieve, but are fine with experiencing emotions along the way, so long as it doesn’t interfere with achieving their goal (after heavy character development for Spock). Sarek privately admits, in a roundabout way, that at least some of his decisions are driven by emotion, such as marrying Amanda, but doesn’t let his emotional private life interfere with his strictly rational professional life, often to the consternation of his children. And then you have Solok, the speciesist captain from DS9, who is totally driven by his emotions and deeply in denial about it. And, finally, Tuvok, who very specifically operates entirely based on logic, rejecting his emotions to the point that he sometimes has problems recognizing emotional behavior in others. Tuvok seems to be what the average Vulcan aspires to be, and many believe they already are, but a significant number seem to be more like Solok, with the better adjusted of them being like Sarek. Spock and T’Lyn actually seem to be a very small minority.

I don’t think the Romulans are really any better, they just solved the problem with external control rather than internal control, that external control being an inescapable police state.

T’Lyn is one of the most rational and logical Vulcans in the franchise and she was booted from the Vulcan fleet for not fitting into their strict dogma.

Depending on who’s writing the episode, yeah, and it’s a great concept that I felt was explored well. Other times, however, we have an episode where Tuvok talks at length about the training and conditioning he underwent to control his emotions, then in the very next episode, talk at length about how Vulcans are naturally emotionless and incapable of feeling emotion at all. This chronic lack of consistency in the writers’ room is a big part of why Moore left the show to reboot BSG.

Unfortunately, the writers often forget this. VOY waffles a lot on whether or not Tuvok is literally emotionless.