You say hot-headed bitch like it’s a bad thing.
Torres (apart from being half-human) was not the first Klingon female shown to be technically minded; Kang’s wife (Tara? Something like that) was a science officer. Admittedly it’s hard to imagine Torres needing to be rescued from Pavel Chekov. It’s much easier to imagine her relieving him of the burden of his testicles.
I don’t think doing something different with the characters is a bad thing. Why must all Vulcans have the same complexion as Spock? Why *should *all captains be male? (The latter is espeically egregious.)
Also, I tend to think that the Planet of Hats things stems largely from viewers & readers extrapolating incorrectly. We tend to assign traits to a new thing or people based on the first examples we see. An alien whose first encounter with humans was Kirk & crew might think that all humans eschew marriage and take their workmates as ther family, when in fact that was a peculiarity of those six or or seven persons. An alien who first met the Enterprise-D crew might think humans are all terribly motivated and technically-minded, when in fact there’s reason to think many 24th-century Earthers are lotus-eaters. And so on.
I watched a good number of episodes, as my then-girlfriend loved it. (That was the second most compelling evidence of her bad judgment, number one of course being her poor taste in men.) There were actually a good number of watchable episodes; unfortunately they were randomly distributed among the dreck. At least TNG had the common courtesy to largely concentrate their stupid episodes in the first and last seasons.
My point is that Klingons were played up for their “Warrior mentality”. So it was an interesting twist to make the engineer Klingon, as opposed to the Security Officer, Tactical Officer, etc. And a female Klingon as a major character.