Back when they did the JJ reboot I suggested a number of places that the whole "showing Trek to a new generation" thing was bupkis, especially since it was more like Star Wars, and doubly so because everyone at this point "gets" Trek through the caricatures. This has even spread into TNG at this point with all the Picard memes and stuff.
That if you really wanted to give Trek to a new generation you would do it just like TNG did, like VOY did, and like ENT tried. Each generation should get their own crew to "grow up" with.
All of us here know Kirk/Spock/etc. and a lot of us even prefer Sisko/Garak/etc. but by and large we "grew up" with the TNG cast, they were our first and the ones who brought us into things every week. Those of us who started a little bit earlier with the Trek films didn't get them every week so it wasn't the same experience as what TNG would bring.
Guardians is proof you can take characters nobody knows and make it a billion dollar franchise. The Abramsverse films had the old characters, and ran through all the beats like McCoy is onry, Spock is logical, Kirk is reckless, KHAAAAAAAAAAN!!! but they didn't exactly sell anybody on it as a franchise or an universe that exists outside of their hijinks until Beyond. And by that point, people had tuned out the reboot. The reboot wasn't even necessary except that they were so adamant about keeping it tied to the original canon and bringing in Nimoy. I have a long carepost here or on GAF about how had they not tried that it would have eliminated half the plotholes, if they made it just "unseen adventures with Kirk/Spock" or whatever. In CANON there's seven years of the crews missions that have never been explored outside of the second-tier canon comics and novels. Beyond arguably fits into this fairly well, while the other two films don't. Discovery is now mining the Pike years, and Pike in ST09 also fits the "canon" they wanted to preserve so hard.
Abrams/ENT/DIS have a similar problem in that they're trying to tell stories pre-TOS when our real lives are advancing faster than anything. Which was why VOY visits LA had to ignore the global war supposed to be happening at the time. When TNG kicked ahead 80 years, while in real life moving ahead two decades, it let it stay ever so ahead of us. Now it's antiques, PADDs have less capabilities than iPads and Kindles. (Link to scene I can't find where Riker hands Picard like ten PADDs to read because apparently tabs were lost.)
When ENT went back, it had to deal with not only our real world advancement, but also the fact that it had to look "older" than TOS, until they just gave up and said "okay, we have transporters again" because it was too story restricting.
But I've digressed. The other key TNG got from the time skip was that it could rework the galactic scene. Klingons were now friends? Where were the Romulans? Meet the Ferengi! The Borg! The Cardassians! The Bajorians! (The Dominion!) ENT and DIS are playing in established waters. And then when they do something decent like the Xindi arc, it's something that you think someone might have mentioned in the future. And the show never got to the Romulan War, and when it started hinting at it, it was fighting with the prior canon establishing that in-person contact was never actually made between the two sides and that the weapons were lower tier than what the show had already used in season one. You get that in our modern treatment of recent history, but never to that extent to where the historical records are somehow getting worse.
So kinda like that proposed cartoon series, what they should have done was jump ahead 50-100 years, still have all the races we know and love stopping by, but with a new diverse crew, new aliens, etc. Basically what TNG did and DS9 went hardcore about. The New Frontier books are arguably a better template than VOY which filled up the show with Borgs, Vulcans, Klingons, etc. and never seemed to understand the concepts of distance. (Kazon space for two years! When they're a nomadic scavenger set of tribes? Okay!)
