An interesting parallel....
By Jadzia-Dax

I wanted to comment on this specific Q & A piece from above, which I will reproduce here:

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TW: How do you respond the criticism by some that the series disrespected Gene Roddenberry's "vision"?

IB: Everyone speaks for Gene Roddenberry, who’s gone, and I would not speak for Gene Roddenberry or be so quick to speak about what Gene would want or not want. The Gene Roddenberry of 1966 was a hell of a lot different than the Gene Roddenberry of 1989 and I'm sure had he been around in 1997 he would’ve been different from the Gene Roddenberry of 1989. So that criticism I don’t care about at all.

What I resented a lot of the time in both series, TOS (which I was a huge fan of) and TNG, was their "having their cake and eat it too" attitude. When they needed to blow up ships, they blew up ships. But there was no repercussions to it, usually, not really. No one sweated, it was like a tea party in the Hamptons. People were getting killed, there was no sweat, there was no fear, there were no repercussions, and I don’t care whether they're people on a ship and you don’t see them and you don’t care--bad, bad, bad, no good, bad, bad, image!--[and] bad storytelling.

We wanted to say, "hey, people in this world that we live in can't get along in this little tiny planet and we have more in common than Cardassians and humans and we can’t get along." So why do we believe in our absolute arrogance that in the future we can have these disparate races and they will all find ways to avoid war, and we will find ways to avoid war especially with our Federation way of sucking people into our Federation [laughs]. It’s a very interesting universe that I did not think had been explored enough.

We said, "we’re going to explore it, not fully certainly, we’re gonna go down some avenues that people won’t like, and some of it won't hold up to scrutiny, but at least we’ll be doing it instead [of the alternative]." DS9 certainly was the series that refused on a day by day basis to play it safe. We all knew it, every writer was behind it. It was an exhilarating place to be in creatively.
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Now... what is very interesting about the above is first, what I highlighted. And that is a "vision". And what I am also seeing, is that it appears that Behr is to Roddenberry as Gene Coon was to Roddenberry, ie., in an interview snippet from my Sci Fi Channel SE of TOS "The Devil In The Dark" (the Horta episode), Herb Solow made the following comment (one that I have posted before):

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"I think the original series started with a basic idea of 'We're now on this planet, we're now going elsewheree, and we're going to see what's over the next hill, over the next planet', whatever. Uh, and I think audiences went with us. It also was a series where we'd come up with ideas, that were not the usual science fiction ideas that had been done prior to the original Star Trek. It was a series that dealt with episodes where non-human heroes and non-human characters were treated as human beings.

At first, before we hired a man called Gene Coon, who came in during the first year to produce the series... Before that we did have a few episodes where when we landed on a planet and if Captain Kirk didn't like the people, he'd shoot 'em, right? We decided that was wrong. We decided... especially with Coon. Coon came in and said 'Hold it. Why did we do that? Why don't we find out what they want? Why they're there. They have a right to be there. Maybe we don't. Maybe there's a particular character who is a rock. A rock who is protecting her children. Maybe they have the right to be there.' And so we'd deal with characters on that basis.

And I really think that that was an amazing approach to television back then. You know... mid-60s, And I think audiences found it."
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And again, what is highlighted above is a "vision". This time from Coon and Solow.

Now, what is interesting to compare is how Behr critiques TOS and what he thought should have happened, with how Solow indicated how Gene Coon critiqued TOS when he was first brought on the show, and what he thought should have happened.

All of this in contrast to Roddenberry's so-called "original vision". ;-)

And when you see what these 2 men did to their respective shows, they each (obviously with others) had a clear "vision" that they were actually able to run with, that was adaptable enough for someone to write stories that could follow it, and these often turned out to be quite unique.

Ie., Coon basically said - "Why kill what we think of as "monsters"? Maybe these "monsters" are actually intelligent life forms and deserve to exist and interact and reproduce and whatnot?"

Behr basically took this the next step further by already assuming what Coon had developed, but now postulating that things weren't as rosy as one might think, but the potential would always be there to rise above it.

And this is what I think is needed in ENT. Using the above as an example and having some "vision" to go in yet another direction (even if out of frustration - which is apparently what both Coon, some 35 years ago felt and what Behr, some 10 years ago felt - which makes me wonder if that "frustration" was exacted against them on purpose to MAKE them write around the restrictions in order to avoid the cliche and thus come up with something "unique"... ;-)).

Ie., you need someone for ENT to maybe to say - "Well now this is stupid. Why don't they do "X"? Or why can't they be "Y"? And perhaps that is how one can breathe something different into Trek with this 5th incarnation.