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Your points are well-taken. I agreed myself, before the end of Voyager's run, that Trek needed a break from television... or at least a major shift in perspective. My novel Berserker, in fact, was originally designed around my take on the direction Trek should have gone, to get away from the military angle and go civilian for awhile... see how the "other side" lives. I always thought Firefly was also a good take on the "other side" of the Trek universe, where people don't get the perks of Starfleet life.
But as you pointed out, Paramount never could see past the dollar signs earned by the franchise, and if they thought they could have continued the franchise with a Starfleet ship crewed by Muppets, they would have done so happily.
Even now, Paramount refuses to give up on Trek, and while they are pushing a revisionist movie forward, they are taking the original series and adding updated special effects and ship scenes, Lucas-style, to give the show a facelift (and you'd better believe that, once they're done, the face-lifted series will be available on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray at every supermarket).
Given the wealth of experience Paramount has built up creating Trek, sometimes I imagine all of that redirected into a totally new SF franchise... such possibilities...
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