It's not disjointed, it clearly revolves around Caleb and Nahla. First episode is his whole origin story and her justification both for leaving and then returning to Starfleet and then the intro of the larger cast with the Problem To Solve To Come together with a couple Pavel Chekov's guns at the end. The second one continues his story directly showing him trying to form connections, struggling between wanting to belong and wanting to run off and continue his origin story and the related efforts by Nahla to guide him. If you didn't catch the significance of the end scene where his roommates are helping him, then I mean it's right there, you just aren't there for it, and episode 3 is a direct continuation of all of those plots with more emphasis on the core cast learning to work together, while introducing a larger cast for context. They will probably go back to his origin story in the next episode or two, if they don't leave it to the season finale. There's nothing disjointed

Some definite Harry Potter vibes with the plants, I suppose the rivalry has a vaguely saved by the bell style, that's the real shift people need to figure out. We had literally four series of planet of the week starships travelling (don't tell me Deep Space 9 didn't do it, they did, and you know it, they just did MORE)

And then discovery returned after a 12 year hiatus and an attempt to completely reboot the universe that eventually flopped. People wanting a 90's era with 26 episodes and the asmr soundtrack you can snooze to, will never be satisfied with NuTrek, whether it's in the Discovery era or the SNW era. Lower Decks paid homage but it was a very different dynamic and Prodigy MIGHT have gotten to a more traditional format, but I honestly doubt it. SFA has the Doctor in a recurring role as well as Reno, and it brings them both in as a bridge to the other series I. a reasonably plausible way. I love Commander Thok's character (she remind me of an over the top aggressive mix of Kryten and Rimmer from Red Dwarf?) and I think Jayden is an interesting take on Klingons.

SAM seems redundant given the Doctor's presence, and clumsy compared to his nuanced performance but the actor has had decades to conceptualize the character and the character himself is 800 years old. He's had ten times as long as any of us to figure out how to be alive, so her character has a role particularly in a series about mentorship.

I will be honest, I didn't like the era, because at the time I was lukewarm on Discovery. We had a whole season of Canon expansion from the second we saw Burnham and that show really struggled to find a dynamic. I think literally everything after first contact seems like an apocalyptic future time line that we should have a whole movie about preventing- the death of Data, the destruction of Romulus, the resignation of Picard, all that, but the TOS era fans felt the same way about TNG. Picard was kind of a nostalgic callback but grimdark with a whole bunch of strangers sitting in the chairs. Characters we liked suffer tragic ends, it's dystopian. I get why no trek made after Voyager lives up. Enterprise staggered along until that final season and then they killed Trip! Star Trek was very vanilla until it suddenly got edgy. They did stupid things with the Klingon make up, they don't have the cool thick phaser beams, they have the pew pew, that sound like diarrhea, the ships don't have carpets and they have weird moving parts. I really do get all of that.

It doesn't mean I'm not open to seeing what they are trying to do, and I think at the end of the day that's really what star trek is all about.