TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Yeah, I wasn't going to touch on the spore drive because they really seemed to be playing on the idea that it took the singular genius of Stamets to create it... except his genius wasn't singular. He had a research partner, Straal.

Yes, Straal died and Stamets went to the future, but whatever groundwork science existed for their research to even get off the ground still existed for other scientists to build on. And they started this research in a classified lab, sure, but surely others in the lab knew about it. And it only took 6 months after the technology was co-opted by Starfleet for the war effort to be fully functional in two separate ships, so they must have been pretty far along by the time they left the lab too. Two separate human scientists of about the same age who knew each other were able to found the groundwork from existing science and tech and work independently on developing the technology on two different ships... so the likelihood that they were just uniquely qualified and no one else could do it is extremely unlikely.

As you said, the spore drive was used openly and effectively in the war and the Klingons and others certainly knew about the capabilities of it, as well as some details of its nature. And even if the existing research and memory of the Discovery was successfully buried in the federation, the scientific knowledge it was based on was not. The scientific principles upon which the tech was built could be rediscovered eventually, especially if people had an idea of it's usefulness (putting it mildly).

Given the technology would literally be a paradigm shifting technology as much or moreso as warp technology was, there is absolutely no way that the tech wouldn't be pursued by someone... eventually... Yet 1000 years later, and Discovery is still uniquely capable of essentially teleportation in the entire galaxy, at at time when interstellar travel has become critically difficult. It's value is beyond priceless. Even the fact that future Starfleet isn't immediately using it to build more is mind boggling... or that the past starfleet didn't either for that matter..

They could have kept the knowledge of the spore tech even if they had to hide the existence of the Discovery. It was the ship itself that was the host of the Sphere data, not the spore tech. It stretches believability for sure that Starfleet didn't do what it could to preserve this technology which could see them extending their INSTANTANEOUS reach to the entire galaxy.

And if they were going to pretend it never existed for inexplicable reasons, they could have at least made the cover up believable by doing something like planting false scientific data around the technology, poisoning the well to prevent others from discovering it for a long time. But no, they just say "shhh" and it goes away for a millenia.

So was this technology just singularly impossible to recreate? Was it sheer dumb luck that it was created at all? Is it impossible to reverse engineer? Or did the writers just fail to think of a good way to explain why the tech never reoccurred in 1000 years? 🙄