Every time more news about this comes out it looks worse. It looks like they're giving it the JJ treatment and just making it up as they go along.
Perhaps more so than you might realize...
I've been biting my tongue about it for a while, but the news seems to be getting out now.
The in-house Los Angeles VFX team that CBS started assembling last summer for this show have all be laid-off, officially as of today. Pixomondo is taking it over, and they handled the latest JJ Trek movie. The meat and potatoes of the work will likely get done in Beijing now.
Several of my friends are out of work now, and severely disappointed. It isn't the usual case of them being done and getting let go to save costs. They still had not been able to accomplish much of anything, between all the delays. The scripts were only recently finished, and shooting only just recently began. Changes in personnel at the top have lead to the decision to shop out the work to an established VFX shop that they already have a relationship with, despite the budget and working conditions of episodic television being vastly different than movie work. One story I heard was that the Pixomondo office in LA is conveniently located very near to one of the show-runners.
The now defunct in-house VFX studio had been in contact with me for the last 6 months, about joining the modeling team. It was very on-again / off-again, due to the delays and such, and then the modeling supe I would have been working under got ousted. Now I'm feeling like I dodged a bullet. I'm glad I never ended up actually giving notice at my current job, and hoping we can bring back some of my friends who left to work on this show.
I don't want to touch on other things I've heard, but I will say that I've largely lost any optimism I've had for this show. The powers behind the show seem to be trying to completely re-invent the show while leaving their distinctive marks, much like JJ did.