I know this is how people in the 80s and 90 imagined the future and a lot of concepts were probably too far fetched for them.
BUT… why arent they using drones to explore planets? why are there not more drone-spaceships? why does enterprise need a crew to begin with? Why is there so little automation? Why so few uses of AI in general?
I am saying this as a star trek the next generation person. I’d also expect them to have full video and sensory streams of any surface mission teams.
It’s fun to see what modern tech is missing from decades old Sci-fi.
One of the most interesting ones for me, is that there aren’t any screens with text on them shown in the original star trek. That’s because when TOS was made, computers communicated by teletype/printout. TOS is older than the concept of text on a screen.
That said, I feel like a drone would be part of a tricorder. I have a DJI drone with a good camera, and I use it a lot for getting pictures of things that are out of my reach, if you had one paired with a tricorder, you could look at things out of your reach.