I dislike how little ENT resembled Star Trek because I felt like it didn't try hard enough to establish its own look. Enterprise was visually identical in many ways to the Stargate and Babylon 5 franchises in just the general way things were laid out, lit, the aesthetics they were going for, etc. It didn't just not look and feel like Star Trek, it looked and felt like one of Trek's competitors of the same era.
I'm fully aware that nobody on Paramount's production staff would have liked the idea of returning to look established for early Starfleet in The Cage or even to a TOS look. Even though ENT did actually prove that you could do TOS with modern day lighting and camerawork and still have it look really pretty. I understand the reasoning behind changing the aesthetics, but the aesthetics of Enterprise just felt wrong, honestly. They were cheap and uninspired to look at, the uniforms didn't feel distinct, everything was drab and poorly lit, and most of the sets don't really feel like rooms on a spaceship. It feels more like they shot most of the show in an old office building or something.
Yeah, I get that the NX-01 is smaller than the Constituition and therefore gonig to have less space on it, but like I said earlier the interior didn't feel like a ship of any kind, more like an office building. Another thing that also bothered me on the show is that the NX-01 can hold like 100 crewmen, but it feels like the main characters are the only people on the ship sometimes. There just some weird distorted sense of scale going on with the whole show that makes it feel cheap.
Having a show set pre-TOS actually leaves a fair amount of room to get imaginative with the look of the show since TOS itself had such a different look from the later series, Enterprise just didn't take advantage of it. I'm starting to wonder just how strapped for cash the show was because this isn't the only circumstance I can recall where they cheaped out on stuff; the network didn't appeal to be very kind to them.
