Also, I think it's worth noting that Star Trek: Enterprise got cancelled just as it was getting good.
Going back to the beginning was all well and good in concept, but it was too restricted in what species it could use and in the path the storyline could evolve in. They would have been better off to go with a story line which involves the borg reaction after the end of voyager or one of the first time ships and it's role in the temporal cold war.
The Temporal Cold War is a good idea, as the idea could have easily sustained its own series.
My biggest gripe about
Enterprise, however, was the lost opportunity to do something really unique in the Star Trek universe, as the concept was golden.
Let me explain....
In the ST timeline
Enterprise takes place, for the most part, prior to the Earth/Romulan war. Now if we look back as the original show, Spock says the Earth/Romulan war was fought with very primitive spacecraft, powered by nuclear reactors, without large video screens to see what's in front of them, and where ship-to-ship communication was almost impossible. Essentially the ships described were like giant space-going submarines.
If they had used these guidelines when writing
Enterprise it would have been so much better. The set should have looked less like the traditional Star Fleet ship, and more like the bridge of the Red October. They should have really driven home the point of how primitive the first Star Fleet vessels were.
Instead they used a set that looked more advanced then the set that was suppose to represent a hundred years worth of technological advancement. They had all the comforts of a conventional ST show; a large video screen, easy ship-to-ship communication, transporters, phasers, etc....
It was sometimes hard to believe that this was suppose to pre-date the Kirk days, especially when a description of
Enterprise's own timeframe in the Kirk show described very primitive ships.
So, IMO,
Enterprise was a lost opportunity to both respect previously established cannon AND do something no other ST show had done before.
