Given how much Gannett is to blame for newspaper consolidation and the resulting shitshow, this feels more like a “let them fight” at best.

I always figured the real authentication was tied into the comm badges, and the authorization codes were just a fancy “are you sure”

True, it’s hardly a complete explanation. But it at least makes it easier to rationalize it as “because effects budget” than might otherwise be the case.

(Alternate comedy option: Starfleet isn’t human-dominated, it’s actually Lanthanite-dominated and they just got better about hiding the accent.)

Eh, the problem I have with that approach is that in my case, Adderall helps me do stuff like “get the trash out to the dumpster” and “make phone calls”. Executive dysfunction is a bitch and a half for plenty of reasons that’d still be there even if we finally attained fully automated luxury gay space communism.

Regarding the humanocentrism, there was one possible explanation I hit on while playing Star Trek Online and noticing the availability of species-specific ships (such as the Atrox carrier and the Andorian escorts) – basically, most member worlds maintain their own independent fleets, but Earth doesn’t. The human prominence in Starfleet is an artifact of that – there’s no official Earth Expeditionary Fleet, so the people who might join it apply to Starfleet instead.