Rodenberry being disagreeable and retardedly stubborn seems to have been at least every bit as much of a blessing as a curse.
And frankly considering the town and time period he worked in I can understand him growing increasingly irate over time.
But take 'main characters aren't allowed to be in conflict with eachother'. That's a rule Rodenberry held to that get brought up all the time. "How can the writers write if the main characters don't get to be in conflict'.
But then in tng everyone acts like an adult, they're mature, they're not prone to petty interpersonal drama or bitching or various slap fights. And they retain that quality even after Gene had to step back and had less creative power over the show. And in Discovery and Picard people don't.
Perhaps people trend towards low hanging fruit when working at complicated tasks, and on occasion someone needs to be at their ass to make them think a little deeper.
Gene had a lot of goofy and dumb ideas but at its core I think he understood a few things that many don't.
Like there are different ways of thinking and not everyone runs on the same assumptions. And his idea of utopia is it's possible to communicate and cooperate and respect others despite that. That feels like the core idea behind his optimistic visions. Different cultures, different outlooks, different belief systems, different systems, but they're cohesive. They make internal sense. Some can be superior to others, but even inferior ones can have a point. And you have to have the right outlook. And it's not trivial to 'fix' them. And being good sometimes means being ruthless, but not without thought.
And over time the more distant he became from Trek, the more Trek lost that.
And now it's all low-hanging fruit.
