Could you elaborate?

Still, it seems like a risky and high-handed move in context. Most likely he's just doing it because it's how things were on his own ship and to assert that his way goes. I've never heard anyone give an account of why it would be better to change the shifts.

I agree that the Construct was a bit of a kludge to make it so they couldn't just go directly back to Starfleet. But I would defend the Rutherford plot as more organic -- it's not just that he's the victim of a mindwipe, which we already kind of knew. We need to understand why he would cooperate with something evil, or even why the evil people would single him out. Making him become a different person with the mindwipe actually adds the the coherence (or provides them with a way out of the hole they had inadvertantly opened up with the mindwipe plot... that's the nature of long-running storytelling).

I will edit to hedge.

Okay, first they try to cover it up, because it's easier if the Klingons never find out. But then once she's uncooperative, you go all out to show it's serious. And you don't have a Klingon observer because you don't want the general public to know the Klingons are dictating such an important domestic policy.

Of course you can watch it and it mostly makes sense from a PTSD/pragmatism perspective -- that's how they structured it so that it would reward rewatching.

Yes! I've been thinking for a while that Discovery season 1 is the Last Jedi of Star Trek -- except of course that Star Trek started with that alienating move for its new era.