I was sort of with you on the ocean stuff, swimming there isn't really a substitute for a lifejacket, but swimming being for the privileged is a weird take.
If you don't have access to a body of water for free, then public pools are usually cheaper than a movie ticket. You don't need any equipment, all you need is one person that kinda half way knows how to swim and is willing to point you in the right direction.
My kid bought me a Back to the Future DeLorean for my birthday, about 2000 pieces.
Initially I thought it was kind of a mis-gift, something they would enjoy more than me since I hadn't built a set since they were small and needed my help, but I made it a point to crack it open instead of letting it sit and it turned out to be quite enjoyable.
Sorry, I don't care what Kurtzman says about this (or an actor that is obliged to defend a project he was in) when it's justifying putting out schlock for mind share. If that's the best we can do, let it die - it doesn't make anything that exists any worse.
Trek needs a good show that stands alone and isn't aimed at us but a fresh audience. That means no cameos, limited references, not animated (that is a stigma as much as I love LD), and actually taking the time to get people invested.
Basically, they needed Discovery to not be garbage. I know non-Trekkies that were actually excited for a new sci-fi romp and got turned off almost immediately by the nonsense writing. Not the cast, or stupid out of universe concerns about being "woke" or some shit, just plain out "this makes no sense and isn't fun to watch" and it was hard to disagree.
Everything since then has lived in Discovery's shadow in terms of new audience and has mostly dealt with that by being aimed at fans of 90s Trek and nobody else. Prodigy may be an exception here, but that suffers from being oriented at kids.
I wouldn't do a mailing list these days, but as someone who spent the early part of my career interacting with devs that preferred this method, it's actually pretty ergonomic by a 2005 standard. A message thread aware, text based email client that can turn messages into patches in a keystroke makes it actually pretty comparable to modern code review...
I think it's hard for younger devs to get this because they're used to email being stuck in a crappy, unthreaded browser interface or Outlook etc. (which are terrible for mailing lists) and most collaboration taking place in code review and chat platforms like Teams/Slack but for decades before these were feasible, email was the way...
In a certain way, it does feel close. We can't figure out how to go faster than light, but we could theoretically get to a significant fraction of c and 20 years isn't such a long time to plan for in terms of getting a probe there to start relaying messages that take 20 years to get back.
I mean, it's the span of a career, but people could conceivably work on the launch and live to see it return data.
GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don't really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.
Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.
In my experience that's a very appropriate boner.