Closed-circuit beaming was always a possibility (Lurry’s office had a transceiver unit in “The Trouble with Tribbles”). Apparently Roddenberry et al. failed to consider this, or turbo-lift rides were just too good a device for delivering expository dialogue to abandon.
By Picard’s time they were beaming people directly to one spot or another (usually Sick Bay) with perfect accuracy, even without a receiver on the other end. Technology had evidently taken a giant leap forward in the intervening, uhm, 78 years (but they still habitually used the turbo-lift).
Accurate as they may be, transporters still require a skilled operator to function safely. Whereas elvevators haven’t needed someone to operate them since the 20th century. And H&S aside, transporters doubtless take up a buttload of power and at least 2 buttloads of cpu cycles. That seems like a lot of computer, engine, and man power just to travel to the next floor up.
And there’s the whole thing about how the elevator is less likely to catastrophically malfunction when the not-a-military-vessel Enterpise gets into yet another fight with the Klingons/Romulans/All-powerful-Space-Wizard this week.
In the TOS book “My Enemy, My Ally,” they played a chess variant early on that used a small transporter to move the pieces around. Later, Romulans had boarded the Enterprise, and some of the crew were trapped in the Rec room, but had managed to raid an armory first. They rigged the game machine and used it to transport grenades into the middle of enemy boarding groups.
Yes, it was TOS. The one where Scotty was suspected of being a murderer. You can see all the TOS episodes on youtube, though, for me, they look weird: we always saw them in B&W, in colour, the sets look a bit garish.
I never cared much for the sets in TNG either. I read somewhere that Matt Jefferies visited the main set around the time they started production and complained to Roddenberry “I gave you a bridge, and you’ve turned it into the lobby of the Hilton.”
Would they even need a fixed bridge on a well-designed starship? They could control the ship and keep tabs on everything using iPads from any random conference room. I expect a proper starship would have most of the important action taking place around a table in Ten-Forward. Or around the pool. Or, Dude, in the bowling alley (“shut the fuck up, Wesley”).
Because all that was in the timeline before someone went back in time and let all the computer pioneers have access to 29th century tech, creating the computer revolution.