A fairly thorough piece.
Whatever your view on whether it’s a pro or con for the ensemble and storytelling, SNW ‘Lost in Translation’ having covered off the ‘met him when he made fleet captain’ reference to Pike in TOS, there seems to be a great deal of flexibility for SNW to keep bringing Jim Kirk into its stories.
Here’s one unexpected take.
So what does that mean for Kirk? We have to wait until 2265 for him to take over as captain of the Enterprise, right? Well, maybe not. Canon is oddly vague on the handover from Pike to Kirk. In fact, only one episode of TOS actually takes place in 2265: “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot. There’s also nothing that indicates Kirk didn’t serve on the Enterprise in another role before getting promoted. If, in theory, Pike were to step down and someone else became an interim captain, then nothing is stopping Kirk from serving on the Enterprise before 2265.
Again you’re moving the goalposts demanding greater and greater explicits not because you’d be convinced but because you’d expect the explicit doesn’t explicitly exists. This is a low stakes conversation about a fictional universe intuition reinforced by references is sufficient, and if in subsequent series writers forget these details or go another way well then that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Though I don’t know why you don’t find this very intuitive the episode Regeneration featured borg drones from the events of First Contact, sure you may be entitled to your wishful thinking but to claim its never alluded to or incredibly hard to believe that first contact one of the more successful startrek films was an influence on enterprise is itself incredibly hard to believe.
As for Dauntless I’d say the screen canon speaks for itself why would I need characters to constantly break “show don’t tell” and hold my hand every step of the way?