Actually, the all-officer concept dates from the TOS age, per Roddenberry himself as quoted in the “Making of Star Trek” book. At the time, his reasoning was that everyone aboard was a fully trained astronaut so for all intents and purposes everyone was an “officer” - remember that in TOS the ensigns wore no distinguishing insignia whatever, making the title of “ensign” more like a question of posting and career track. (Which ties in neatly with what we see now in the latest film: this Starfleet assigns you “ranks” based on the job post you’re holding, rather than based on a strict scale – a Cadet 1st Class can be made a Captain even before graduating, leapfrogging everyone else.) GR’s idea was then more to the effect that there not be two distinct “castes” of commissioned v. noncommissioned: everyone’s a fully trained, educated spaceman, but some just make a career of being working crewmen while others go up the managerial track acquiring rank.
Some reward. If this is the guy, he doesn’t look too happy to me: Unknown performers | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Poking around, it seems you’re right and I misremembered, but while Roddenberry originally envisioned Starfleet as an organization of officers, that was belied by the crewmen mentioned in the original series, and the enlisted insignia in the movies. It was only in early TNG that it became an important distinction, and much like the “we don’t use money” schtick, the writers moved away from that as soon as they could.
Yes - he could have just said that there was no longer a distinction of holding or not holding a commission and that it worked like police ranks or Merchant Marine rates(no “up or out” progression, you can be a beat cop or master deckhand for 20 years). But he always had that stubborn utopian streak.
Also there was the fact that TOS not having yet acquired iconic status or established a “canon”, the writers tended to write for what they understood and kind of disregard the guidelines.
Of course, it’s fairly obvious that you can do just that. Uhura & Chekov are commanders for at least ten years. Data never advances beyond lieutenant commander, and it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want to, as, given his position on the ship he’d have to take a CO or XO post, and though he was clearly competent to do so he preferred not to.
Lazy androids! Almost as bad as a Vulcan … mutter, mutter, mutter …
It wasn’t laziness. He demonstrated that he was capable of being a competent battlefield commander. Hell, from the very beginning it was clear that he was a much better tactician than Riker. But going to past second officer would mean that he had not only do the battlefield stuff but keep the faux-Picard subroutine on almost all time time, and that would not help him learn about humanity, which was clearly his main thing. It’s like Orig!Monty Scott not really wanting to be a C.O. and thus not caring when Sulu & Chekov eventually passed him by in the hierarchy, though technically he was always senior to them.
You weren’t programmed with humor, were you? 
Actually I was. I responded to your humorous remark by pretending not to recognize the facetie. It’s what we called meta-humor at the university.
musical sting
Good one 
I apologize for not reading through the entire 20 pages of this thread, but I just had one question about the old Spock character.
I realize that he believes that the uniting of Spock and Kirk is important to stopping Nero’s destruction of Earth, but he keeps pressing on about how it is a REALLY BIG DEAL that Spock and Kirk become friends because this will affect a lot of future events. Old Spock admits towards the end though that he realizes he is in a completely different continuum and that his past will not necessarily be the same future for the both of them, so other than the current Nero problems there shouldn’t be anything so important about Kirk & Spock being buddies.
Is this Spock just just pushing his hand because he thinks Spock and Kirk will be better off together, or is there some all important universe dependent reason why they should work together that they don’t know about yet?
Not sure if this should’ve been a different thread or not. But I think the mods can move it if they like, so I’ll answer anyway.
According to Abrams, the theme of this movie was fate…that despite the change in the timeline itself, the crew of the Enterprise was destined to be together. Spock Prime’s line “I am and will always be your friend” is quite important here, as it indicates that he holds that promise even across alternate timelines.
But it’s also more than that. Spock Prime knows his younger self’s limitations. Young Spock thinks he can do anything, and needs someone to take him down a peg. And Spock knows that Kirk was, at least in his timeline, the best person to do that. That’s why he tells Kirk what to do to get Spock to relieve himself from command.
Spock knows that he learned a lot about his humanity from Kirk. It was under him that he became a full, mature person. He wants to give his brash younger self the same opportunity.
There’s also the point that the Enterprise seems to have accomplished a lot, and perhaps Spock thinks it couldn’t have happened without Kirk. But, seeing as Nimoy has said he will not be in the sequel, it seems he did not have anything specific in mind. But maybe that’s all to be revealed in a later movie.
Also I think that Old Spock really values the Friendship he had with Kirk. The Uhura thing aside, without Kirk, Spock would have been lonely in both worlds (Vulcan and Earth) Kirk was the only one (Until now) Who reached out to Spock as a close friend.
A universe with Spock sans Kirk would have him being an efficient officer who was mistrusted, misunderstood and very alone. Think the Galileo Seven. Even as a commanding officer all the humans constantly questioned his command decisions and the motivations behind them. Kirk was always the buffer between Spock and other humans and the one who outwardly would demonstrate trust in Spock’s abilities in front of the rest of the crew.
Or maybe it is meaningless because they were all just making it up as it goes. In other words, poor writing with no real idea of what the future holds for them, just a cute piece of dialogue.
That gets my vote.
Nimoy has made it clear in the past that he will not sign up for a part where he delivers lines that have no justification. He’s really big about maintaining the character of Spock in particular.
So if they had no justification when they wrote the line, they most likely had to come up with one, later.
Anyways, I’m pretty far into the Death of the Author literary camp, anyways. I don’t care what the author thought it meant. I care about what makes sense.