ST-TOS was a landmark show. So much so that people never forgot
it and initiated a 20 year campaign to bring it back to television.
I agree that the characters represented all that is best about
an inclusive society.
But I wonder how that one episode with 2 primative peoples
at perpetual war with each other would be viewed today. I'm
thinking of the one that concludes with Kirk reciting the
Declaration of Independence. Even as a kid, that choked me
up a little bit when hearing it. Today 30% of high school
kids polled are in favor of a reduction of freedom for
a spurious security.
The fact is that productions these days are made by business
administrators rather than even studio heads. So the
production landscape has become severely limited.
And there's not enough of us old trekkies to keep it going.
Think of what they did with that show in symbolic and
artistic terms: showing the race conflict of the time as
a fight between two men, each having a half/half skin color
on opposite sides-- and when they spoke they reflected each other's
image.
That one was written by Harlan Ellison. Ellison is now one of the
senior figures in s-f and fantasy, mostly as a consultant and
editor.
As a final aside, I wish I knew all the authors of those episodes
who worked under pseudonyms. Major figures of that era wrote some of them under pen names.