The Orville was a better Star Trek than STD.
Mmmmm yes and no.
Orville definitely had a lot more of the 90s ST vibe. And the first season being the more comedy/parody oriented season is amusing at parts (though, for recursive humor, gotta give it to LD).
But where I think Disco excels - and by that I mean perhaps an order of magnitude more and in a much more overt manner - is how they do a remarkably good job of showing and telling the audience about radical empathy and acceptance with both character and story. These themes imo are, incidentally, the primary moral and societal virtues of the UFoP.
But yeah, I absolutely agree the world building is lazy as all fuck, the direction and writing are… variable, and there are a handful of scenes that I would call the acting outright “cringey” (for fucks sake Burnham shut the fuck up about that one paragraph you memorized from Alice in wonderland because you thought it sounded cool and edgy nobody cares)
