TNG also failed to flesh out the details of how their economy worked.
It is very easy to say “everyone is just happy and behaves well”.
I mean, yeah, sort of. Very, very progressive for the time. But they had a huge blind spot in the military structure, which is as hierarchical and patriarchal as ever. I am not talking about command and control structures, which are potentially effective, but about the idea that a single captain would run a star ship over long periods of time instead of being floated among different crews that get a chance to vote for their leader.
Rotating leadership in a military-ish context in deep space sounds like the material conditions for the creation of factions and potential mutiny. If getting rid of every hierarchy, even ones you freely volunteer for, is the only way a future counts as positive, there’s no point in writing sci fi. Ordinary citizens in the Federation aren’t in a military hierarchy, and it’s post-scarcity, so people aren’t facing economic coercion to join Starfleet. Not conforming perfectly to your personal idea of utopia isn’t a blind spot, though Trek has many of those, as well.
