That's a great point. They're certainly at least 3-dimensional, as seen most clearly when someone is on the main viewscreen but their eyeline matches the smaller figures on the bridge, rather than looking more like a zoom window as it would if it was a simple camera-flatscreen configuration.
I've headcanoned it that Discovery was covertly part of a Section 31 collaboration with the Department of Temporal Investigations to test technologies and materials acquired or implied through various temporal incursions, the goal being to see which ones could be arrived at and used without causing potential disturbance to the timeline. The updated look of Federation ships is also a result of that, producing a 23rd century which looks quite different but in which events play out functionally the same.
All it would take is a Short Trek where someone rediscovers the network and encounters a group of advanced beings living there, who explain that it has been closed to current warp-capable beings because they have proven themselves not ready for the privilege yet.
Discovery was like Alexander the Great stumbling onto warp drive.
They couldn't have destroyed the network, because it was strongly implied that it was a fundamental aspect of the universe itself. What would have been better is if some higher-dimensional beings living there said "You abused the privilege, and your rights to use this network have been revoked".
The retcon is that the whole spore drive program was actively suppressed, because any knowledge of Discovery and/or Control would lead to cosmic apocalypse. And so part of Section 31's imprimatur was to work behind the scenes and prevent it and other disruptive tech from seeing the light. And other civilizations did the same, because the same thing happened to them at some point in their history.
It's pretty sweaty, and requires quite a bit of stretches credulity, but it beats a lazy handwave.
It's a nice pat way of thinking of things, but it presupposes some sort of justice or built-in meaning to the universe, when the real truth is that there is no inherent meaning to any of it. Meaning is an emergent property that evolves with the development of sapience.
None. I find them all so false and superficial, claiming to have all the answers but refusing to actually share any of them with the flock, saying "you must find the answers for yourself, trust in [religious whatever]." I'm like okay, so you're admitting that you are superfluous to the search for meaning. Got it. Bye.
Groups like this do it because they can, and usually not for any other reason. If they cared about anything they would make statements about how easy it would be for foreign governments to do the same thing they did, or work on taking down alt-right cesspool websites or whatever.
I often feel the same. Actually good homemade stuffing is amazing. But then they go and put big chunks of celery or fucking pickles of all things for some reason in it.
So if you want your players to start RPing better (yikes that autocorrect) and playing more heroic people, you have the wrathful god spare them at the last moment or resurrect them with the threat of following through next time they meet if they don't shape up? Or is this just a good way to wipe the board with a good ol' TPK?
It is kind of nuts how many of them are named after white men or US place names.