See I think you missed a lot. For one thing there was certainly a lot of Being Born So Special. TOS established the idea that the Enterprise has what’s often referred to by fen as “the god crew”, everybody is absolutely positively the best at their position, Kirk is the youngest captain, Scotty hotwires the Enterprise to out perform all other Constitution class vessels, Bones cures incurable diseases in days, they always out perform. It’s the nature of Trek, continued in every show, that crew is always better than any other crew that encountered the same problem.
And no Trek really isn’t about working hard to chase dreams. It’s about a society where technology has solved all the material problems, so now the people get to do whatever they want. Ever wonder what the majority of society does in the Federation? Mostly it seems to be nothing. They have replicators, they don’t need jobs. Sure some of them chase dreams, because they don’t need jobs, nothing much else to do when the replicators provide all.
Trek is ultimately a pretty shallow show. Yeah they hooked some messages in a few episodes. But even those are pat mimeographs about societal problems people have been complaining about for ever, with a little cheap makeup. Their attempts not to be shallow show the shallowness, that’s why the best episodes are the fun one like Tribbles and Shore Leave.
There’s no bait and switch. You fooled yourself, a lot of Trek fans do, they focus on eps like Last Battlefield and completely forget the joy of “brain brain and brain what is brain”. It’s real Trek, fun and crazy with the god crew, and maybe a moral lesson in there somewhere.