>>120074546In their defence that's because the entire Star Trek canon originally comes out of live TV shows that were made back when practical effects were the main go to and doing the full The Thing experience was fuckin' expensive.
So the entire Star Trek set up is basically 'Oh these aliens look like us but with buttplugs for horns, we call them the Unicornia and they're just like us but strange and a semi-transparent metaphor for some aspect of human existence and philosophy.
It grew out of that over time, to a degree but you can't just escape your past.
