It’s not shifting goalposts, you’ve just been arguing against Star Trek missing different goalposts to the ones everyone else understood it to be aiming for for several posts.
The Fedaration core worlds are ones like Earth, Vulkan, Andoria and Tellar that have been member worlds for a very long time and are physically closer to the center of Federation territory. By the time of TOS, it’s obviously not just the founding four worlds, but as TOS is a series about a multi-year deep space exploration mission, nearly every planet the Enterprise visits is going to be either outside the Fedaration or a frontier world. If a planet only gets a throw-away line rather than a load of exposition about how they’ve been a member for decades and several of the crew are from there, then that’s enough to say it’s a frontier world.
It’s not shifting goalposts, you’ve just been arguing against Star Trek missing different goalposts to the ones everyone else understood it to be aiming for for several posts.
The Fedaration core worlds are ones like Earth, Vulkan, Andoria and Tellar that have been member worlds for a very long time and are physically closer to the center of Federation territory. By the time of TOS, it’s obviously not just the founding four worlds, but as TOS is a series about a multi-year deep space exploration mission, nearly every planet the Enterprise visits is going to be either outside the Fedaration or a frontier world. If a planet only gets a throw-away line rather than a load of exposition about how they’ve been a member for decades and several of the crew are from there, then that’s enough to say it’s a frontier world.