So I do like Star Trek a lot, especially TNG, DS9, and Below Decks. Voyager and TOS are fine. Space socialism is pretty good and I can't get enough of it. There are a few common tropes that irk me. tho.
-
Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense - You telling me that all these different species and planets get together to chill, and the vibe they're gonna channel is Ohio?? Football (soccer) or some version of hockey make a lot more sense, you can pick up and start playing immediately. I can't imagine Worf wanting to learn all those pointless rules about balls and strikezones and fowls. Sisko is arguably the best captain of any series, and I really get pulled out of an episode every time he drops some awful baseball trivia. It's only slightly better than Nascar. I actually know one Scottish person who really likes baseball, and he's literally the worst person I know.
-
The tribunal - It's so damn common. It seems like every season there's got to be a court-martial, hearing, or appeal against a Starfleet decision. I guess Law and Order is big there. It's probably a minor critique, but it does reinforce the ideology that Western courtrooms are fair.
-
Kirk is a sex pest - This has been said to death, but leave your subordinates alone.
-
Poker in TNG - Poker has to be the worst form of entertainment, and I genuinely like maths. I blame TNG for reigniting the poker craze of the 90s and ruining all my guy friends' personalities.
The three white male captains get to command the biggest/fastest/most famous flagship in the fleet.
The black captain starts off as a commander on a broken down space station in a bad neighborhood.
The woman captain gets hopelessly lost in the first episode.
These are not good tropes.
Also, why the fuck are Starfleet naming conventions so human centric? We should see a bunch of Starfleet ships with Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellerite names. You can kind of handwave away the ones that are abstract concepts like Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant, etc by saying their names in each language are different. But there are so many ships named after Earth locations and historical figures. Where are the other races in all this?
Apparently each member species retains their own space force after joining the federation and starfleet was formed around what was earth's.
Thankfully Lower Decks fixed a little of this. Star Fleet is just one fleet organization in the Federation. With apparently the Andorians and Vulcans having their own ships running about doing their own things too. Like the Sh'vhal in Lower Decks, having to come in and save the Cerritos. Star Fleet is just the biggest of the bunch and more likely to be "out there" doing exploration instead of local system patrol or whatnot.
From a storytelling/production standpoint: Humans are easier/cheaper to costume. Human sized corridors easier and cheaper to build for doing shots with human sized chairs you can get out of a Lexus. So Starfleet is a very human fleet. Also in the early days of models, TOS just reused the enterprise over and over with different number combinations on the hull and a different name, so they don't have to build new models. TNG they had money, but kept a design style going cause they had the molds and its cheaper to follow a style rather than start a new ship whole cloth. Thus why some alien ships in TNG are just models they built for the movies turned upside down or backwards and repainted. DS9 and on they started to breach using CGI so they got to expand a little but still had that same style to focus on. Modern trek they got lazy and copy pasted ships :P
Overall it is impossible to write a sci-fi and avoid human centrism in any fashion, even the abstract, because we only know the perspective of being human, and humans are the only ones we yet know writing fiction. Even in fiction where humans are say, the one amongst many, and not the most important in things, (And not throwing a fit about it like Anakin Skywalker. Looking at you Mass Effect) The story is usually from a human persepctive trying to understand the unknown alien ways that exist around them. Kind of like the impression I got from the Chanur novels by C.J. Cherryh but it's been a decade or more since I read it so I may be wrong.