Back to the topic at hand, to further explain my position that Trek works better as a TV show, I recently read an article in the New Yorker about the film industry, its priorities, and how those have shifted over time. Blockbusters are basically how Hollywood funds itself anymore. And blockbusters require certain boxes being checked. Stuff like big explosions, flashy F/X, and wall-to-wall action. Movie audiences expect a large-scale sci-fi film to be a blockbuster, and Trek is no exception.
The thing is, it's actually really hard to make a blockbuster that's also a good story. I don't mean that it's hard to make an entertaining blockbuster. I mean, it can be, but it's easier than making a good story that's also a blockbuster. That's largely because the things you need to do to create a blockbuster are at least always in tension with the things you need to do to tell a good story. Character development, pauses in the action to allow for build-up, exposition, etc. all of that is necessary for a good story, but is at odds with the stuff you do in your average blockbuster which is more about wowing an audience through spectacle.
Trek, at its core, is about more than just ships with saucer-sections and warp nacelles, technobabble, and primary-colored uniforms. It's about interesting stories. It's old-school sci-fi that asks you to contemplate an idea through the filter of a fantastical future, and to actually care about what's happening. Over time, it became about the characters, too, but I think that's largely a result of the longer-running TV shows than it is about the films. More on that in a minute.
Basically, a blockbuster isn't interested in that stuff. Or at least, it's far less concerned with exploring the interesting ideas and characters, and far more interested in exploring the whiz-bang effects. You do get rare successes that stand alone, of course, but part of why Marvel's "shared universe" concept has (in my opinion) worked is because it functions almost like a TV show. By virtue of introducing characters in other films before they appear in their own, or by seeding ideas and continuing characters across multiple films, you get to know them all and begin to care about them more. Marvel seems to also understand that caring about the characters (which requires you to actually develop them instead of using stock characters) makes you invested in the events that happen to them, which in turn makes you care about the whiz-bang effects beyond just "Wow! That looked cool!" When XYZ character is disintegrated by Thanos, you care because you've gotten to know them over the span of many films.
But most franchises can't do that because they don't have an infinite supply of interconnected properties from which to draw. That includes Trek. The strength of the Trek movies was always that they were piggybacking on the TV shows. You knew the characters already from the shows. You cared about what happened to them as a result of that. Try to imagine walking into a theater cold and watching TMP. *****, that would be a terrible experience. But because you know these characters already, it allows you to invest in their actions more, and care about the results. I don't really care when Ilea and Lieutenant Blonde Guy get taken away by V'Ger. I care when Spock comes back to the Enterprise, though. I'm willing to sit through the slower pace of the film because I already care about the characters.
The other tension between Trek and blockbusters is a question of scale. Blockbusters generally require that events be suitably "big" or at least packed full of "big" effects even if the story isn't necessarily a matter of galactic life or death. But consider a story like that of Insurrection or even TMP. I've always maintained that those two movies felt more like two-part episodes of their respective shows, just with bigger budgets and fewer network constraints. They didn't feel...hmm...worthy of being on the big screen, though. It's not as if you needed a cinematic budget to tell those stories; they'd have worked just as well -- maybe better -- as two-part TV episodes. Wrath of Khan, on the other hand (the gold standard for Trek films) needs a cinematic budget. But not every Trek film can or should be Wrath of Khan. The other part of Wrath of Khan that worked was that you cared about the characters. Spock's death matters, as does Kirk's confrontation with his own mortality, because you've seen these characters grow old. You remember them when they were younger. You know how close they are as friends.
The new Trek films...can't really do that. Mostly because they deliberately jettisoned the backstory of the old material, and didn't effectively spend time building up those connections in the new ones. Instead, they hew to broad caricatures of the old characters and justify the differences from the original source material with a timeline reboot. Their action is also big enough to need a cinematic budget, but it's ultimately hollow because you don't care about the people involved. It's still entertaining as generic space adventure stuff, but it's not really compelling and when it is, it's usually as a result of either calling back to the old material deliberately (in spite of trying to distance itself from the same material...) or it's relying on tropes and caricatures to do the heavy lifting. You care about George Kirk dying more because you recognize that it's sad to have a father sacrifice himself to save his wife and infant son, and because the music is effective at setting the mood. But that's more like "tricking" your brain into caring via association; the movie hasn't done most of the work to build up the character and make you care otherwise. It doesn't really "earn" its emotional payoff (which is a criticism I have about a lot of JJ's films, actually, TFA included).
On TV, this is far less of a problem. The longer form for storytelling lets you gradually build characters. Thus, a character who might just appear as a kind of stock character in the first two episodes is gradually fleshed out over the course of the show, to the point where you care a lot more about what happens to them than to Generic Stock Action Character in a blockbuster. In addition, the smaller scale of TV allows you to tackle smaller-scale stories that (A) can be just as interesting -- in some cases even more interesting -- than the kind of big-scale stories you're likely to see in a blockbuster, (B) can let you really explore a concept in depth instead of having to gloss over it, and (C) allow for more character moments in ways you wouldn't normally have in a film. For all of these reasons, I just think Trek works better at being Trek when it's not trying to do double-duty as a Trek blockbuster, and when it isn't trying to manufacture "high stakes" stories when it should be focused on smaller stuff as well.