1 and 3 are both great, and I'll go against the grain and say that 4 is pretty mediocre.
None of these “very special message” episodes either
I mean, barring the single best episode of the show.
He may prefer to-- he is himself legally blind, and completely blind in one eye.
James Bond, for instance, is a different person from each actor to have played him
That's not canonical, merely a popular theory.
The idea of being able to essentially species change a Klingon into a Human with TOS-era Klingon medical tech sounds impossibly advanced for what the Klingons are known for.
It's also something that literally happened in a TOS episode that almost everyone saw and liked.
It's one thing to do as a one-off gag or a nostalgia bit. It would not have been possible to take seriously for an ongoing series in 2017, except for hardcore fans that don't need to be sold on it.
So why can't you do that here?
It’s 100 years later.
TMP isn't.
“so what about Kang, Kor, or Koloth? How do they look right now?”
Like Klingons.
How many more years before the crude, gritty aesthetic of Star Wars suffers the same fate as the crude and campy aesthetic of Star Trek?
People complained about exactly that during the Prequel Trilogy.
In essence, Discovery followed the same arc as the Star Wars sequel trilogy. They swung for the fences on doing something wild and asking difficult questions that the franchise had taken for granted; and even if the answer they arrived at was affirming, there were too many loud nerds that couldn't look past either the flaws that genuinely existed or their own shallow prejudices. Those nerds were loud enough and long enough that the studio walked it back to try to appease them and ended up with something much less interesting, which both alienated defenders of the early direction and could never appease the bad eggs whose criticisms weren't in good faith, leaving something that only a few appreciated.
You know, as a big FF8 booster, this makes me reconsider some stuff.