Archie thought they owned all the characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog comic, but when they took Ken Penders to court, they found out the paperwork was misplaced. Auditing for specific parts of the IP is tractable; maintaining confidence in everything would be onerous. More so for series with multiple authors introducing characters and plots.

When they're disguised as an Andorian, yes.

There are also scenes with Cardassians that look like Bajorans, a Bajoran that looked like a Cardassian, a human that looks like a Malcorian, and a human/Betazoid hybrid that looked like a Mintakan,

She played the captain of the Lakota later in DS9, Captain Benteen.

The first time they introduced the Eugenics Wars set in the 1990s, Spock called it the last world war. Pike in SNW elaborated that it was part of the escalating conflict that went nuclear as WW3 decades later.

I'd say TNG mostly stopped exploring new frontiers halfway through season 1. Farpoint promised exploration, but soon the ship is ferrying diplomats and scientists and answering Federation distress calls. The worlds are new to the audience, but not the characters.

TNG also had Vulcan extremists (trying to recover ancient psyonic weapons) and Sela must have expected a fifth column ready to defect once her thousand troops landed and gave them an excuse.

He wrote a book about making it. The section on studio interference implies that it was all egregious, but it lists Paramount trying to fix most of the problems that were still in the final film.

She directed episodes of both "Enterprise" and Star Trek: Enterprise", which each lasted two seasons. The stealth name change was surprising back then.

The idea was that the Klingons had joined the Federation and we'd see Klingon Starfleet personnel in the background. When they did add Worf, he was to be more frequently Data's relief than Yar's.

If you read the initial material, Data is drastically different. There is no explicit mention of being unemotional, just that he tends to speak more formally. He's supposed to be more like the Ilia probe than Spock.

Worf didn't exist at first, so Geordi the teacher with bionic vision would be the most "other" character. If they'd seen any of the early press material for Phase II, Spock's replacement there was a very junior officer.

There was a spinoff pitched during TOS called Hopeship featuring M'benga. The pitch for NBC/RCA was that instead of introducing expensive colorful sets, they could stay shipboard and have expensive alien makeup and costumes.

A Quality of Mercy also showed Una in prison, and Those Old Scientists implied she's revered. Did sending that letter prevent Pike from recruiting her lawyer? Things are already not heading down the exact timeline we saw Ortegas alive in.