This is an excellent analysis. And you are totally right about Chakotay: he is never ever referred to as “Lieutenant Commander”. I like your Watsonian explanation! That’s a really interesting take.

Of course, this is also the show that was bizarrely inconsistent with Tuvok’s rank. Interestingly, between Kes, Neelix, the Doctor, and Seven, I think VGR may have had the most rankless characters of any series up to that point. I suppose DS9 could be tied, since VGR only had three rankless characters at once, as did DS9 (Quark, Odo, Jake).

But yeah – I wonder if this reflects a larger trend. ENT definitely leaned on simplified ranks as well – instead of the TNG-era 7-rank scale, we only ever see four on ENT: Captain, Commander, Lieutenant, and Ensign. (It’s not clear to me that the costume department even designed a “hollow pip” for the ENT uniforms.) Under that analysis, we see a gradual trend toward de-emphasizing rank, from DS9 to VGR to ENT to DSC to PIC & PRO (though not LDS).

I propose that the Enterprise-E became somehow entangled in something it could not be removed from. I have a mental image of the ship somehow stuck in “spatial quicksand” or maybe an infinite timeloop – some situation where Captain Worf saved the crew and the ship but then was not given the resources needed to extricate the vessel, leaving it to be abandoned in its place.

More heroically, perhaps the Enterprise-E “saved the day” by hooking itself into, say, the mainframe and physical hull of some starbase that suffering from some sort of collapse of software and/or hardware – saving the station from imminent destruction, but irrevocably welding the ship and station together. Again, perhaps Worf thought he’d be given support from Starfleet to eventually extricate the ship, which would explain why he would later feel justified claiming that the ship’s ultimate fate “was not his fault”.