...except that that's not why Star Trek died at all. I don't quite get where you got that idea.
Moreover, if that was the problem, then how did the JJ Abrams movie solve anything? The aliens were all still exactly the same. The vast majority of the aliens in that movie were all still nearly identical to humans.
The idea comes from cheap science fiction not being accepted by the mainstream.
Abrams solved the alienness problem in more subtle ways. By starting with Vulcan culture, he made Vulcans feel alien without looking super alien. Other aliens in the film not only appeared impossibly inhuman, thanks to CGI, but the aliens in partial masks (The Klingons) got cut from the film because it was confusing to the audience. Partial masks don't make the cut. They just don't.
He also jam packed it with action and spectacle, encouraging larger levels of disbelief suspension.
Star Trek didn't die because of all the various human-looking aliens. It died because it put out a steady stream of garbage for years on end. Voyager, for the most part, was garbage. Generations, Insurrection, and Nemesis were all garbage. Enterprise was garbage until the 4th season. When you put out crap for 10 solid years, people tend to get turned off. That's why it died. Saying that it was because people were turned off by humancentric aliens is downright ludicrous. You may as well say that people got turned off of it because they were tired of seeing Command Officers wearing red and wanted to see them wear gold again, and Abrams solved that with his movie. At least that argument would make some sense, as that's a change which actually occured in the Abrams movie (from the TNG era), as opposed to the aliens, who were no different than they'd been in the past (Hell, the Romulans ended up looking less alien. They used to have forehead ridges).
That's a good point. Star Trek died based on quality. It become niche because of the rubber forehead aliens, and other badly explained 'science' and the suspension of disbelief was too large for the mainstream. Other successful have been crap for more than ten years and survive, because they don't require as much disbelief suspension.
The big giant holes are background objects, unlike Silver Surfer and Galactus who are supposed to move and interact with characters. Those cost MUCH more. The movie Transformers seems like an appropriate comparison here. When the Transformers were fighting on earth each robot in a given scene cost 15 million dollars per second to animate, that cost was bloated if they were Transforming or using a weapon. A cloud and a few holes are not nearly as hard to do, and require a lot less design too. The cloud wouldn't have to move like a convincing person, that's pretty hard to get right.
Based on that statistic, TF had only 10 seconds of fighting. Check your source again on that one. On the point you were making, The Transformers had a lot more moving pieces than any Galactus would, and they had to interact with the real world. Galactus is just floating, larger than life. It just doesn't take "Transformers" money. He's conversing, sure, perhaps holding someone in his palm. He's not walking around and punching things.
This is why movies like Super 8 and Cloverfield are so attractive to studios, because the minimal screentime of the monster makes them cheaper to produce. This is the same reason your favorite superhero will spend so much quality time out of costume, and why in origin movies they tend to spend nearly 2/3rds of the movie out of costume. Obviously this doesn't apply to every style of character, like DareDevil and Batman, but for characters with neat powers this is generally why these movies play out the way they do.
So we don't get a CGI bonanza because studios are cheap, not because getting the characters and their motivations makes for a better story? I'm sorry sir, I just don't buy it.
Don't mistake bad writing for proof that the comic book is flawed. This is actually something Green Lantern illustrated well. While highly comic accurate you could see how all the pieces on their own were very good and showed promise, but when they movie failed to produce a plot to tie these elements together it lost it's effectiveness as a film. Galactus can work just as he appears in the comic.
GL is a perfect example of a CGI bonanza that didn't take the time to make the characters relatable. Not enough out of costume scenes to make the in-costume scenes matter. It made for a bad story. There is a money concern, sure, but the story concern takes precedence. Galactus cannot work as he appears in the comics.
Audiences watch silly things all the time. The Matrix is completely silly, the whole concept is actually completely unfeasible, and humans make lousey batteries. You don't get much more silly than that. Another good example is Dances with Smurfs...erm I mean Avatar, completely silly and even the characters look ridiculous. They are giant blue Smurfs meet Thundercats. The movie told a good story with them though (as far as the box office returns are concerned) and it worked.
It didn't
just tell a good story, it made everything
seem plausible, and chose things that were already serious. Taking the comics explanation, you actually can make human-faced Galactus seem plausible, but I don't think that would add to the story, in fact, I think trying to communicate a vision beyond comprehension in a visual medium would derail the story completely.
You keep saying the word silly, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
