Watching SNW S2E2, I couldn’t help but contrast it with Discovery … my thoughts.

I think this is well laid out and largely accurate, mirroring a lot of what I have felt about the contrast between SNW and DISCO (in my opinion, heavily in favor of SNW).

I will note that Discovery has got this right before in a slightly different format with the Tardigrade in The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry and especially Choose Your Pain. I think they did a wonderful job walking the audience, via Burnham's perspective, through a pretty dramatic shift in how "Ripper" is perceived: first a horrific monster, then a weird, interesting alien and a technical puzzle, and finally a suffering creature deserving of sympathy and protection. They balance that out with competing perspectives around the intimately connected ethical questions around potentially killing that creature to save their lives (and potentially the Federation), culminating in Stamets making an extremely forceful endorsement of the creature's right to life.

Nothing else in Discovery's catalogue (save perhaps S4), or any other pre-SNW nuTrek show, did nearly as good a job tackling a classically Trek ethical dilemma. Plus, they took full advantage of the continuity between episodes to do so, drawing a benefit from the format which seemed to have far less beneficial effects on the later seasons.