I've never seen Star Trek TOS so I don't know for sure if this is explained anywhere. Does anyone know why they made the switch from red shirts to yellow shirts between commanding officers and security between TOS and TNG?
It's curious that despite this cultural revolution that led to founding of planet Vulcan they are still basically equals technologically. It doesn't appear that a few thousand years of excess emotion and violent tendencies has been at all detrimental to Romulan technological advances.
It would be nice if the show was not afraid of killing named characters in general. Whenever someone dies it is almost exclusively a random character brought onto that episode just to die. Tasha Yar dying is more of an anomaly and never made the show feel like it had high stakes for me.