re: Star Trek has survived on hope, and special effects
Star Trek storylines tend to repeat, from the original series, through TNG, Voyager, and DS9. Same basic stories over and over again. The writers should read a some sci-fi anthologies, they would get alot of fresh ideas.
People are also more educated these days, perhaps not impressed with "warp drive". Relativistic travel would be impressive, believable at least, with plots built around biological longevity and time dilation, functional starship designs, AI, rotating cylindrical space stations, space colonization rather than terraforming, robotic resource mining.