[X] Shey ch'Tharvasse (on sabbatical, working with Rigellians) - bonus to Diplomatic resources
Would have voted for Shey if Sulu wasn't an option last time. I do think limiting the choice to nonhumans is the opposite of Federation ideals. Like race is the sort of thing that shouldn't matter at all to anyone in the Federation if they're trying to live up to the ideals they're so vocal about.
The big problem is that humans are strongly overrepresented in the "waifu war" side of the game. Especially with Chen (an OC favorite) and Uhura (a favorite original character) as potential candidates for The Chair. And by the time both of them are out of the picture, it'll be someone else
in the picture, and someone else...
Sure, we might occasionally make exceptions for favored nonhuman characters like T'Lorel or Nash as head of Starfleet, but it'd be relatively rare. Giving the nonhuman characters a chance to earn some exposure has its appeals.
Not if they're acting to counter a system they know is biased towards humans. And what we've seen suggests that Starfleet is biased. A nonhuman can rise to the top if they're skilled, talented, and well-connected, but the top brass is heavily comprised of humans, and I wouldn't be surprised if we had a few human admirals that are just good, or even mediocre, by comparison due to weight of numbers making humans the easy choice.
Notice all those mediocre human flag officers from TOS, and for that matter TNG/DS9 had some, didn't they?
I actually have a theory as to how this could have happened in a largely legitimate way, inspired by looking at what happened to the Delian League. Basically, the question is, what if the Explorer Corps,
specifically, received disproportionate support from United Earth starting some time in the early to mid-23rd century?
While everyone else is viewing Starfleet as a joint military to keep the Klingons and Romulans at bay, with a side order of doing scientific surveys and whatnot, Earth throws its weight behind the Corps. It's a project a little too impractical to sit well with the rationalist but conservative Vulcans, and a little too dorky for the militarist Andorians (who, in our setting, are closest to Klingon space and most in need of defenses). The Tellarites are supportive, but even compared to that, Earth really goes all in. To the point of investing very heavily in the necessary shipbuilding and recruiting a much greater proportion of their best and brightest to crew the ships.
Thus, the Explorer Corps is sailing around in Connies that were disproportionately built with aid from, and crewed by recruits from, Earth. If you're a really brilliant and talented Tellarite, Andorian, or Vulcan, you
might end up in Starfleet. If you're a similarly brilliant and talented Earthling, you are much more likely to end up in Starfleet... and in the Explorer Corps.
As the Corps establishes its reputation as an elite organization, Corps officers become high-status and are more likely to be promoted into the highest ranks of Starfleet. And the Corps is disproportionately human, because humans shoveled the most talent at it and did the most to promote it, out of all the other branches of Starfleet.
And as noted above, humans in the top one-one-millionth of human talent are more likely to go into Starfleet than Vulcan or Andorian or Tellarite talent. This creates a situation where humans in Starfleet are disproportionately likely to be amazingly talented- not because humans are superior to the other species, but because a larger fraction of their total elite talent pool goes into Starfleet in the first place.
Taken to extremes this could create the nearly all-human crews we see in TOS, but even a lesser form of the same process could leave you with a situation where, say, 50% of all the really great people in Starfleet worthy of promotion to the highest ranks are human. At least in a Federation consisting of only four species...
