I’m always bugged more by individual moments than bigger things. So while T’Pol might be wearing an old fun center carpet as a uniform, and the temporal Cold War is both overly complex and excruciatingly boring neither of those things bothers me more than the following.
In season one, there is an episode titled ‘Unexpected’. In this episode Tripp becomes space pregnant from an alien space mama. During his pregnancy he is framed as becoming irrationally overconcerned about the safety of very minor or unlikely hazards.
At one point, he is in engineering and complains that if you hold onto the handrail of the elevator while it moves, your fingers will be sliced off against the scaffolding since there is no gap.
A crew member brushes him off by just saying, essentially, “Lol skill issue, just don’t hold the handguard.”
Again, Tripp is the one being framed as irrational in this discussion. Because he has a problem with a handguard that slices your fingers off.
Space hormones or not, he’s right that it’s a terrible design.
At least the the ships being warships carrying civilians things has a real life analog. Many (but not all) colony ships sailing Earth oceans were usually heavily armed. This was to deter pirates or privateers from raiding the ships the day after they left port and taking all the supplies they’d need for their colony. And the ships were full of women and children. And more than a few got into battles somewhere along their voyage. Then when the colonists got where they were going, in some instances they’d just pull the guns off the ship and set them up to defend the colony.
It is not canon but one of the novels mention that it was an idea to break species nationalism and encourage a meltingpot. All those kids onboard the starships would identify as Federation not as whatever planet their parents were from.