VindictiveJudge

Early pre-production for the first movie started that year. Might have been to build hype.

The Prime Directive shouldn't have even applied with that. They can't stop a foreign government from executing their own citizens for stupid things, but trying to execute another nation's citizens is an international incident and falls under standard international politics. The Federation seems to give Starfleet ship captains ambassadorial powers, so Picard should have started threatening sanctions and making comments about how executing Wes could be considered an act of war.

I mostly chalk that kind of thing up to writers not having any idea what the Prime Directive actually is.

Their treatment of Ferengi women is also arguably slavery.

You can combine it with nearly anything and it will work. I love chocolate, but I'm unconvinced that it would work as the ice cream flavor in a float, for example. Vanilla? So long as the other flavor is sweet, it will work.

And a tricorder that they occasionally check while trying to look sneaky.

Just double checked. Looks like beta-canon from the novels. Interestingly, according to Memory Alpha, the first episode or two with Bajorans in TNG had all the male Bajorans wear the earring on the right and all the female Bajorans wear it on the left, but right ears for both sexes became standard pretty early on. The only other named character that wears it on the left is Lt Mura in PIC.

Ro was basically on probation in her first appearance or two, IIRC. Uniform modifications are allowed at the discretion of the officer's CO, and Ro was already in something of a disciplinary thing, so forbidding modifications makes some sense.

While the earring is typically religious and she may have been able to argue for reasonable accomodation on those grounds, Ro specifically wears it on the left ear, which is considered a secular way to show familial heritage while also indicating you don't follow the Bajoran faith.

That phaser is shockingly detailed for its size.

My take is that nobody will care if you are bald, but with all their tech you can have as much or as little hair as you want. It's an aesthetic choice that's entirely yours, and no matter what you pick it's not going to really attract attention. I mean, who's going to care about your hair when you live next to a temporally displaced Klingon veterinarian and work with a guy who once got to be Q for a day? And even that is just kind of normal?

They could always bring back Touchstone to compensate.

They couldn't get Chao or Meaney quite as frequently as everyone else because of their film careers. I know with Meaney they really wanted to show off his acting skills when they had him and determined that he portrayed suffering really well, so O'Brien suffered a lot. I think Keiko's problem was that she was only in a couple episodes per season and the focus was typically on whatever horror was happening to Miles that week. She's not so much a bad wife as a barely present side character.