Playfield looks great lit up!

Couldn't disagree more. Prequels are boring. You are simply, as a writer, boxing yourself in when you create a prequel. The audience ALREADY knows who's alive and who's dead in the future. Leaves little room for surprise without stretching credibility.

Reboots can be OK, sometimes, but they also wipe away the continuity set by the original property. That's not good for fans of the original storyline/timeline/continuity.

What Paramount did with these new movies is ingenious, IMHO. You get a fresh start with a young cast, nothing SET IN STONE, and yet the original timeline is still perfectly intact for future Star Trek TV shows, should they surface. The only difference is, Spock is missing and Romulus is destroyed. Really looking forward how this changes the balance of power in the Alpha/Beta quadrant.

My 2 cents as a long time Start Trek fan.

That's true, they sacrifice some of the "Trek" feel us long-time fans have enjoyed to appeal to a larger audience. That being said, the results have paid off.

If you look at the first 10 Star Trek movies, they averaged $75.5 million U.S. domestic. The two new ones averaged $243.5 million U.S. domestic, with a lot larger international sales than Star Trek usually grosses. And these new numbers far exceed inflation being factored in.

Paramount has a winner on their hands with this formula. And for us old-timers, they can always do a TV show in the Prime timeline again....perhaps in the early 25th century.