I’m not talking about stuff like O’Brien’s hollow rank pip, I’m talking about stuff like “Why make Chakotay a lt. commander rather than a full commander?”
It seems like there was at least some forethought put into who has what rank, but it’s not clear to me how much thought, nor how much meaning was supposed to be baked in to those decisions.
For example, Dr Crusher was a full commander from Day 1, matched only by Riker on the main cast. Was that supposed to signify the authority afforded to the CMO? Was it supposed to be blatant enough for the audience to “get” it?
One of the most prominent examples is Sisko starting his series as a commander. Again — was that supposed to signify that he was more junior, a younger officer?
Behind the scenes, I wonder if we can trace a waxing and waning military influence in the writers room over the years. I know Roddenberry served, and I think some of the early TNG writers did as well. But I feel like that became less common in later series? (But I don’t know for sure.)
I think it’s striking that rank is significantly downplayed on DSC, except for Burnham and potentially Saru.
IIRC Roddenberry's idea was that everyone in Starfleet was a commissioned officer, but later writers overrode that.
One of the things that was good in the way O'Brien was written is that he was clearly a senior and respected member of the command structure. But that did not mean he had the positional authority to disobey a commissioned officer's orders should he disagree with them. Something that came out in... err... I think it might have been "Hippocratic Oath", where even though O'Brien had more years of military experience, and Starfleet experience, he still had to obey Bashir's orders (who might still have been a Lieutenant Junior Grade at the time?).