So this in part comes down to what novelists call a “type of conflict” that Trek makes great use of, but Wars does not. The term is usually “Man vs. Technology

So this in part comes down to what novelists call a “type of conflict” that Trek makes great use of, but Wars does not. The term is usually “Man vs. Technology conflict” but if I were writing it, I would call it “people versus tools” to clarify that usually fighting off a robot counts as one of the other conflicts. Like if you have to land a plane, that is PvTool conflict. In Star Wars, this conflict is largely but not entirely absent. In a climactic scene of A New Hope, the rebels get to blow up the Death Star, except—“It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface.” Very short bursts in the middle of other conflict. Similarly there is a short moment of Han Solo explaining that he needs to give his computer time to make hyperspace calculations lest they all die—it is another really tiny moment to enhance a larger existing conflict. Whereas with Trek it is usually more pronounced, “no one has ever done those things with these tools, how do we even begin to do it?” ... A lot of the rest of the apparent difference comes down to format. The Trek that we remember had to be rushed and crushed. The episodes were short and the TV stations reserved the right to show them out of order, so just like virtually all TV off that time, there was typically a short circular arc by which everyone at the end of the episode must more or less be however they started. One really interesting thing someone pointed out to me about reality TV was that it was extremely cognitively complex for its time, and indeed this was its selling point. People watched Survivor because something changed as a result of every episode and there was a lot of mental stimulation of the form “ooh I wonder who would be the best strategic target for him to take out?!” . There was a little of this in other places; I like to think about how we used to debate whether a French chef should really challenge Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, or whether he should have the audacity to fight the nearly undefeatable Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba. But even those shows returned mostly to the same place week after week.