Most of TNG painted a picture of a perfect utopian Starfleet and how humans had grown up, like you say . (Obviously, humanity is never perfect but the messaging is fairly clear: They try.)
I can chime in more about VOY and ENT though…
VOY is my favorite and also when you start to see a little more of humanity in Starfleet. We learned a few things like: The Prime Directive/Temporal Prime Directives were always just suggestions, murder could actually be justified, you will never get promoted past ensign if you play the clarinet and chemical addiction is still a key driver in human decisions and behavior.
ENT is just the human transition out of a military focused race to a race focused on exploration. (I am not sure why Archer always seems to have serious case of constipation, but it is what it is.)
cuchi@startrek.website 2 days ago
I don’t know, DS9 is not that edgy and when there is extremist actions they are complained for not follow the starfleet tradition or being unethicals.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
…fandom.com/…/For_the_Uniform_(episode)
It doesn’t make it seem like there was any comeuppance for , IDK, using weapons of mass destruction on civillians and hoping their evacuation within an hour doesn’t fail.