And the constant tearful goodbyes to characters that either don’t die or somehow come back from the dead.

What the fuck are you talking about? I want you to name a single tearful goodbye to someone who comes back from the dead who isn’t Culber. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

The only thing I can think you’re remotely trying to reach for is Burnham’s mother but that hardly counts when she was dead from the first episode and basically written off until Season 2.

No one character’s big sacrifice to save everything has any meaning when five minutes later the universe is ending again.

That’s the gimmick of the show. They’re a rapid first response vessel to deal with imminent threats.

Question: Do character sacrifices not matter to you if its a show about special forces operators or other people who are in constant danger? Or is it just because it is Star Trek?

There isn’t space for any real happiness in the plot

Not remotely true. There are not as many episodes of Discovery as there are other shows, especially per season, so fat has to be cut. There are no more filler episodes and bottle episodes like in TNG and DS9 because that’s how television has evolved. Even Strange New Worlds is still pretty serialized from episode to episode, just less focused on it. But there is a fair amount of space for happiness in the show. You just don’t see it as much because there isn’t as much of Trek. Want examples? The dance party episode in Season 1, Burnham and Ash (until he goes insane anyway), Burnham and Book, Grudge, Tilly like 60% of the time, Stamets and Culber being on the same page partway through Season 3 onwards, Grey, Zora. Like I don’t know what you’re talking about at all. All of these characters grow and become far more happier than they were at the start.

They don’t really do science.

That might be because they’re not a science vessel that’s just floating around and going to do science. Because they were not built for that. However, science is quite important to the show and comes up with constant regularity. So much treknobabble and they’ve even added a shit ton more. So yeah. They do science.

The scientific explanations of things are extra goofy.

The Enterprise got pregnant. Crusher got fucked by a space ghost. Neural Gel Packs. Everyone being a walking carpet sample in the future. Translators being insanely inconsistent and work by unexplained magic. Heisenberg Compensator. I’m sorry dude, but Star Trek explanations are goofy as fuck. There is nothing about Discovery explanations that could be ANY more goofy than this bullshit:

I was running a neural scan and noticed some anomalous protein readings. I thought there must be some mistake, so I ran an at the Journal and amino acid sequence to be sure. But there it was again, the prion mutation rate had spiked. I couldn’t believe it. It meant the anomalous proteins had to have a strong quantum resonance.

The temporal surge we detected was caused by an explosion of a microscopic singularity passing through this solar system. Somehow, the energy emitted by the singularity shifted the chroniton particles in our hull into a high state of temporal polarisation.

It appears to be a highly focused aperture in the space-time continuum. Its energy signature matches that of the temporal fragments we observed earlier. However, it is approximately one point two million times as intense. I believe this may be the origin of the temporal fragmentation.

After we launch our target drone, the Defiant will have to generate a subspace tensor matrix in the twenty five to thirty thousand Cochrane range. Then the drone will send out a magneton pulse which should react with the matrix to create an opening in the space-time continuum.