I still maintain that Discovery fails because it uses science fiction as a bag of clichés to draw from rather than doing really interesting stuff. They have potentially great characters and do nothing really interesting with them, you have a human adopted by a Vulcan family yet we only get some rather trite family drama. They could have explored better the culture shock with the wider Vulcan society, but they didn't because for all the blabbing by internet ****wits about this being "SJW" the authors are either superficial, cowards of both because real Star Trek IS "SJW" and this ain't it. They couldn't make something like Balance of Terror or The Conscience of The King if someone paid their weight in uncut diamonds or kicked their arse to the Moon and back, there are a few glimpses here and there but other than that nothing.
The problem in the end it's not that is soft sci-fi, Doctor Who treats science like magic siince forever but they usually manage to do something interesting with it, it's that they just re-use sci-fi tropes without really doing anything interesting apart filling some dialogues with science lingo (and no, you don't get to lampshade it especially using a bit that wasn't especially technobabble-y).
In general there is little thought into anything that has to do with the bigger picture since the first season, the first seasonstarted promising but then threw it all away and he secondo season gave us basically Skynet.
Remember, the bad AI in the first Trek movie that was a child looking for answers? Here is just a bad AI, nothing more, nobody even thinks that perhaps giving it sentience might possibly be a good thing because Trek Sarah Connor is here telling us about not-skynet creating the terminators or something.
EDIT
And now I'm just ranting. I trust you get my point.