2. Never Do Fan Service!
The annoying thing when trying to reboot a long running franchise like Star Trek is that you have to deal with the long-term fans that come along with it. Fanatical is putting it mildly when you have people who can tell you exactly how long the Enterprise is or what shade of red the Turbolift doors are. You dont want them to be hostile towards the reboot but you dont want them to dictate how the new Star Trek should be made either. After all, the whole point of the reboot is to attract new people, not make a movie for the fans that already love the series. So to get around that, JJ came up with the plan to create a whole new timeline. The original timeline is still there but JJs Star Trek takes place in a parallel timeline. That way he is free to do what he wants with Star Trek and he cant be accused of destroying the Star Trek everyone grew up with. Its OK folks, that Star Trek is still there but now we have two timelines to expand upon. That decision was a smart one. JJ didnt stop at rebooting Star Trek; he also wanted to have full say on merchandising and cross-platform releases. His vision was to launch a new series of videogames, comic books, novels and merchandising. But the problem he had was that although Paramount had control of the Star Trek movie series, CBS had the rights to the TV side. All merchandising decisions had to be run by CBS. JJ wanted them to stop producing products with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoys faces on them and instead make the switch to the rebooted cast. But because CBS annoyingly made millions of dollars from their existing Star Trek merchandise, they were reluctant to drop all that on the say so of JJ Abrams. Even when JJ presented them with evidence collected by his production company that the audience were confused by the different actors portraying the same characters, CBS still said no. Saddened that his new audience will have to deal with trying to get their heads around the idea that Shatner and Nimoy also played Kirk and Spock before he improved Star Trek; with a heavy heart, JJ dropped the fight. So instead he destroyed Vulcan, redesigned the Enterprise so it looked out of proportion, changed the look of the Klingons and the Romulans, changed Spock so he was emotional, changed Kirk into a jock and stuck two fingers up at proper Starfleet rank promotions. The old fans knew all that stuff was wrong but this is new Star Trek for a new audience and they didnt care if he blew up Vulcan, they dont even know what a Vulcan is.
As long as you keep the basic catchphrases and the words ''Star Trek'' in the title, it is still a reboot and you can cash-in on nostalgia. All the other stuff, forget about it.