For someone who adamantly defended the Kelvin movies 1701, your stance on Discovery is really a surprise. Especially when you include insulting the Kelvin movies in your post.
As for "making excuses." We've seen a couple minutes of footage from a trailer cut to appeal to mass audiences, what else are we supposed to do? Instead of being overly negative like so many fans are being, I'm being optimistic.
Time will tell if Discovery is good or not, and I imagine if it is than people will overlook the aesthetic.
As I say in my post, I'm conflicted regarding Discovery. It could be great, it could be bad. Even if it's bad, doesn't necessarily mean that it remains bad. For season 2, the studio may shake things up and bring back a lot of the old guard who had taken such care and attention in making Star Trek during the 90's, consistent with Star Trek continuity and canon. let's be honest here, when you hear people who have been involved in Star Trek for decades, come out and blast Discovery, it doesn't fill me with confidence that this show is going to be any good; Rob Meyer Burnett, Doug Drexler, Michael and Denise Okuda - these are names I would expect to be involved in creating this show, not slamming it. That's not a good sign.
And I'm not so sure it's going to be so easy to overlook a crucial aspect of Star Trek, an iconic aesthetic that must be present for people to be able to place this series. If you can't place this in either timeline then fans won't care and new audiences just won't bother. CBS need to win the fans over, I'm not so sure they will.
I hope that the reason we've not seen Discovery is because this show will blend the aesthetic of the Abrams movies with the aesthetic of the original series. If that's the case, and if it's done effectively and it clearly sets this show in the prime timeline, then great, let's see it evolve into the iconic TOS we know and love.
As for the Kelvin movies, I've defended them to a point and I can afford to accept them because they are confined to the movie screens. If Star Trek Discovery begins to go down the Kelvin Timeline road, then we're going to have a problem because as far as I'm concerned, the movies work because they are throw away and enjoyable, regardless of any contemporary issues they may deal with effectively.
Those moves are fun but entirely forgettable. They're not important, not crucial to the continuity of Star Trek and are, in effect, over bloated generic Hollywood action flicks. Fun for the 2 hours in the cinema, enjoyable on a Saturday night with the family but hardly something that deserves a loyal fan base. They take far too much inspiration from Star Wars and quite frankly, we've already got Star Wars for that, we don't need a poor mans copy of it. The studios should have the confidence in Star Trek and the unique differences that make it just as popular.
As a resul of their execution and direction, all three, while consist of good production values, are entirely inconsequential. If that's the future for Discovery then Star Trek is dead and should remain dead until someone comes along and gets it and understands what Star Trek is and needs to be.