Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 Viewing (Spoilers)

[Maxperson]

They have used the transporter buffer to suspend transport, for a short time, in order to do things like deactivate the weapons of incoming people. The idea of a long term suspension was a really bad idea. They could have mitigated it somewhat by perhaps saying that it would require an extraordinary amount of computer power to "maintain pattern cohesion", or some other sciencey sounding guff. That would explain why Scotty could do it; he had an entire ship's computer to play with.

M'Benga did it long term in this series with his daughter using only the medical bay transporter. It doesn't seem to take much of the computer power.

 

[MarkB]

And not just transporters. You'd have Scotty say something like, "If I just hook up the phase translocater to the warp coils while playing solitaire, I think we can hit warp 45." And then he succeeds, yet nobody keeps the upgrades or puts them on future ships.

They've done that sort of thing with energy output, speed, transporters, sensors, weapons and more. If Star Fleet scientists actually followed up on any of this, ships would have been 5x more powerful than Picard's Enterprise decades earlier.

One thing I liked in the TNG episode Relics where Scotty is brought back is that we do get a mention of one of those clever fixes being still in use.

In Star Trek IV Spock and Scotty have to come up with a way to recrystallise dilithium, which was hitherto impossible. And in Relics Geordi explains that the crystals in the Enterprise-D's warp reactor are being periodically recrystallised even while in active use.