So why can't you do that here?
It’s 100 years later.
TMP isn't.
“so what about Kang, Kor, or Koloth? How do they look right now?”
Like Klingons.
...That's literally what happens in the Dune books.
How many more years before the crude, gritty aesthetic of Star Wars suffers the same fate as the crude and campy aesthetic of Star Trek?
People complained about exactly that during the Prequel Trilogy.
I mean... not that much. Daleks have gone through three redesigns just since the show went back. Sontarans went from the world's most unconvincing rubber masks to makeup. And how many eyes do Silurians have-- two, or three?
because apparently Star Trek, unlike every other fantasy and science fiction thing I like, is Forbidden from being treated like a secondary world that should have its own internal consistency.
Nonsense-- other long-running universes encounter retcons and visual redesigns all the time. Quick, how old was Dick Grayson when he first became Robin? What color is Superman's S? How old was Magneto during the Holocaust? What happened to Luke's father? Did James Bond fight in World War 2, or participate the Cold War?
Perhaps it implied that.
But it only ever implied that, and meanwhile we had other evidence that implied a separate conclusion, in the form of Kor, Kang, and Koloth.
Which is more likely-- that every Klingon Kirk encountered during his five-year mission was a survivor of the augment virus (edit: Including Kahless, who lived and died centuries before Archer!) and no Klingon encountered outside of that time period was; or that the Klingons ruthlessly quarantined or even executed carriers of the augment virus and wiped it out before it got too far, and TOS's visuals aren't literal?
I dug 'em. It was a good experiment in pushing Trek's aliens beyond a forehead and an accent.
Or, keeping up SNW's traditions of reviving projects from early in Star Trek's history, we could finally get M'benga leading a medical frigate in the vein of the Hopeship pitch.
Is there anyone still holding out for a “refit” of the beautiful SNW Enterprise so that it “really” looks like a set from the late 1960s?
Sadly, I can confirm there are.
I concur with your conclusions. In the famous words of Captain Picard, it is possible to make no mistakes and still fail. Tilly did the best she could against a superior opponent, and when the opportunity to turn that defeat around arose, she scraped out a win with casualties minimized, and I think proved herself more prepared for command than the show or fandom generally gave her credit for.
To you.