this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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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.