[oykib]

Originally Posted by Thomkal

The special effects were great, and much more in line with the recent movies. Acting was good I thought, especially the captain and first officer. Actors seemed much more into their roles then say the first season of TNG or DS9.

It was probably impossible for them to create something in the original timeline. They are trying to cover up the fact that Discovery takes place in a third continuity. There's a Screenrant article about how licensing affected the recent movies.

As for why J.J. Abrams and his filmmaking team created the alternate Kelvin timeline to begin with, the answers to that can be found in the confusing real world issue of who owns of the rights to Star Trek: Paramount is the wholesale owner of the Star Trek property; Paramount in turn was owned by the Viacom corporation, which also owned CBS. In 2005, Viacom underwent a corporate split: a new Viacom was formed and the ownership of Paramount was transferred to it. The previous entity called Viacom was renamed the CBS Corporation. When this occurred, ownership of the Star Trek feature films made before 2005 was transferred to Paramount but ownership of all of Star Trek‘s trademarks and intellectual properties now belonged to CBS Corporation.

However, in order to make any new Star Trek movies or television series, Paramount has to license the rights to Star Trek from CBS. This is what happened when J.J. Abrams and his production company, Bad Robot, embarked upon making his Star Trek film; Paramount and Bad Robot licensed the rights to create an alternate Star Trek copyright from CBS, in part to enable Abrams’ desire for his film to be about a younger version of Kirk and Spock, which would radically change established canon. Hence, Abrams created the Kelvin timeline, which allows him and his successors like Star Trek Beyond‘s director Justin Lin to do whatever they pleased with their version of Star Trek, since the results of this creative freedom would not conflict with nor infringe upon the canon established in the Prime timeline. It’s worth noting that with the declining box office performance of the Kelvin timeline-set Star Trek films, the Prime timeline solidly remains the more popular version of Star Trek.