>This has produced some interesting push-and-pull over the years and a
>lot of design compromises driven by deeply riven ideologies. Some of
>them are fairly benign; the first five or six Starfleet Chiefs of
>Staff imported and re-established the tradition for legacy, staid,
>elegant but ever so slightly boring ship names from the old United
>Earth Space Forces (and before that, wet-navy) traditions, which is
>why the ships have a lot of place names and one-word virtue names
>(Enterprise, Excelsior, Valiant, Defiant, etc.) rather than the
>more arts-fartsy names some of the more avant-garde members of the
>Federation Council sometimes advocate for. The Betazoids, for example,
>periodically push for ship names like Spirit of Unity Undaunted
>or The First and Last Argument of Fools and they never quite
>seem to make it out of committee.

The committee's newest member, that guy from Bajor, is clearly having far too much fun with it. I'm still sorry they shot down his suggestions of Sufficiently Advanced Technology and Series of Unlikely Explanations.

>Frankly, even the holsters were regarded as something of a grudging
>compromise; they ruined the lines of the pants, you know.
>
>They didn't quite take this to the point of total madness; stuff
>still, you know, worked.

Then the 'pyjama pants' incident happened. According to the stories I've heard, the idea originally involved smart-fabrics that were still in the design phase at the time. When the fabrics turned out to A) Not work as intended, and B) Cost an absolute fortune on top of that, the idiots behind it all went ahead with a budget version that quickly earned the hatred of almost everyone in Starfleet. Some near-human species apparently couldn't even put it on without assistance. The backlash was so bad that it killed almost every last bit of control the 'fashion!' movement had over Starfleet uniforms until the 2350s started the problem all over again.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter