Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

[Frazod]

But why did she need to be a prodigy in the first place? They could have just made her a regular old ensign. Original Uhura was just a competent officer.

To be fair, they're also doing it with other characters. Chapel was just a nurse who made doe eyes at Spock - not some flighty super nerd applying for high-powered intellectual fellowships. I guess Number One (who didn't even have a name in the original pilot) could have been some genetically engineered alien, but it never came up. And the doctor is a super assassin with PTSD barely keeping his rage in check. Like I said before, they're basically supersizing the characters just like Abrams did. Except for poor George Kirk, who has become the bumbling underachiever comic relief guy, like the moron in the Snoop Dog beer commercials. And while Pike was originally a combination of Kirk and Picard, lately he's more like a combination of Picard and the guy from Orville.

Perhaps they feel like they have to do this to maintain the interest of modern audiences, but it's a far cry from TOS - that had three (perhaps four, if you count Scotty) main characters, and everybody else was fairly interchangeable.