Ajam was Excelsior when it was EC then over to regular ground postings groundside before assignment to Enterprise. Most EC officers have spent time in the regular fleet. Zhang was regular fleet up until going to Enterprise, Taggart was EC then over to Sappho which was regular fleet.
There seems to be a thing where the EC starts to bottleneck after Lieutenant so that they feed back out into the regular fleet for promotion then a few of them get fed back in to be Captains. I honestly can't think of a single officer that's never spent time in the normal fleet.
I don't think the EC/Regular fleet distinction is actually that much of a thing, because narratively it /never comes up/ as a thing. It's never shown as a hard split. People go back and forth.
I submit that this appears to be true to a degree that is something of a relief, and that is
a very very good thing. The only antidote to the problem I described earlier is massive, constant cross-pollination between the Explorer Corps and the regular fleet. So that in a real sense the "Explorer Corps" is a purely administrative organization that just happens to coordinate several big starships.
The mechanics create an illusion of it being otherwise, sometimes, what with the regular fleet and the Explorer Corps having different crew pools. Narratively, this does not seem to be so- and a good thing, too!
But when did this happen? I mean, sure, Kirk said something to that effect and then violated it every week and twice if the day ended in Y, which it didn't always because he ran the Enterprise on Fizzbin Time. TNG treated it as a serious matter but from Code of Honor, Pen Pals, Who Watches The Watchers, it is something that can bent if there is a greater good to achieve (and following certain rules in the process helps). Starfleet can even order delibrate violations of it in TOS and TNG (the Organians were believed to be pre-warp until they showed otherwise, and Angel One involved a pre-Warp civilization that Starfleet had actual diplomatic relations with, though rarely; Code of Honor might have involved a pre-Warp civilization as well though it's a terrible episode).I'm not sure it actually came up in DS9.
Only Voyager treats it as sancrosact as you describe. And even then the writers deliberately arranged a scene so Janeway got hit in the face immediately after telling Tom Paris to let a whole civilization die. For all we know that treatment has more to do with Janeway's personal philosophies than the actual understanding of the Prime Directive as applied by Starfleet; it's not like there's anyone in a position to argue with her about it for most of the show. Most of the other characters are either very junior comparatively or not even actually Starfleet.
There's Tuvok, but if you're counting on Tuvok to tell you when it's a bad idea to inflexible follow the rules, something has gone very,
very wrong.
Here's the thing. If we look at the TOS era, the Prime Directive is obviously being taken in limited doses. But look at WHY.
For one, military necessity is seen as grounds to disregard it- the Klingon conflict is very close to a hot war, and has been for a long time. But the thing about Starfleet Command being able to
directly order officers to violate the Prime Directive is that it enables time, due consideration, and discussion with sociologists and anthropologists and so on about the likely consequences of the violation. If you believe the Prime Directive is a core value of your society, then violating it should require some kind of "due process-" and that due process would be carried out by Starfleet Command, not by captains on the spot. Presumably, a bunch of professors and admirals sit down around a table. They go "it looks as if the Organians are going to be conquered by the Klingons, do we interfere?" Or "there is an extremely valuable mineral deposit located on a planet occupied by a bunch of big Iron Age dudes, can we send a delegation to negotiate for mineral rights?" The professors and admirals debate the issue, and
only then does Kirk get orders that override General Order 1.
In some episodes, we see particularly blatant Prime Directive violations- usually committed
in the past by the Federation itself, but with at least one exception where Kirk passes out muskets to a bunch of hillfolk to counteract the muskets passed out by the Klingons to the valley folk. And in that episode it's made fairly clear that Kirk is arguably in the wrong to do so.
We also see the Prime Directive interpreted to allow interference in a 'stagnant' or 'enslaved' culture, so that blowing up the computer that mind-controls everyone on the planet isn't a Prime Directive violation.
Now, we can try to construct a coherent picture out of this, probably successfully (though Kirk really dodged a bullet, if so, over the 'muskets to hillfolk' incident). The trick is that this is during an era when Starfleet is on a war footing, AND we see repeated examples of entire planetary civilizations going horribly wrong due to interference by Federation scientists and officials. Whole planets full of Nazis and gangsters.
...
Then we have the TNG/DS9/VOY era. In DS9 it effectively doesn't come up. In VOY, well, as discussed- Janeway treats it as sacred. In TNG, Picard
talks like it's sacred. He wouldn't be doing that if he didn't believe in it.
it's just that when the chips are down he'll decide to ignore what the rules say in favor of what he believes ought to happen. He is, in effect, compromising a principle that
he clearly believes in, and ignoring regulations in the process, for what he sees as a greater good. Janeway doesn't seem to be willing to take that step.
The problem is, military regulations are designed to be followed even when the officers in questions have some qualms about doing what they say. If someone orders me to fire a phaser and vaporize a Cardassian and I'm not comfortable with doing that,
I still have to do that. There are exceptions for orders that are straight-up illegal (e.g. shooting prisoners). But by and large, a military organization cannot function if its officers only obey the orders they feel like obeying.
And Starfleet, while it may not be a military as such, does operate under a military degree of discipline. It has to, because its ships go into frequent danger, deadly violence does occur on a semi-regular basis, and ultimately if something horrible is threatening the whole Federation, it's going to be Starfleet that has to do the job of a military until the danger is over.
So Starfleet regulations are in effect military regulations, and have to be designed with the intent that they will be obeyed.
Which means that if you write rules that say "do this no matter what," and some officer
actually does this no matter what, you don't have a leg to stand on in criticizing them. You can't say "but when we wrote the rules, we intended you to ignore them if you thought the circumstances justified that!" Because in that case you should have written the rules differently in the first place. If you didn't intend military regulations to be followed even when people aren't comfortable with the results, you should
explicitly leave it up to the discretion of the people involved. You shouldn't make a rule with the intent that it be broken.
You're putting Starfleet in the position of having decided that noninterference is vital to their code of ethics, writing a law that would enforce noninterference... And then of having to act
shocked when a Starfleet officer actually follows the law!
