Adventures of a Canonista; also known as "I watched ST Nemesis so you don't have to."

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I'm about a third of the way into my post about Spock, and there is just so much information to compile. Hopefully I'll have it up tomorrow, but in the meantime, my "people are wrong on the INTERNETS" rage is sufficiently peaked to address something I'd planned to talk about after the backstory resources were done. Namely: authorial intent with

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As far as I am aware, Spock never went in on the command track. This is the point where you have to be very explicit about the differences in TOS versus AOS canon. In the Prime universe, Spock is Second Officer on the Enterprise when he joins the ship in 2253; more notably, he is chief science office. Since one only has to successfully complete the Bridge Officer's Test to be eligible for a command role, it seems most likely that he was exclusively science track until Pike offered him the 2XO commission upon satisfactory completion of the BOT.

It's similar to Scotty, in a way, because while Scotty was initially command track at the Academy and switched to Engineering, he had clearly taken the BOT at some point in his career to be Kirk's 2XO, but he also never received a ship, despite being ranked captain.

It's interesting to see how people are associating the command track with captaincy--the two, in Starfleet, don't go hand in hand. You go into command track if you want to be a bridge officer, and perhaps you might be commissioned someday for a starship captaincy, but there was a figure floating around somewhere that only 9% of command-track students ever sit in the captain's chair. If having a starship comission was the only reason to go into command, why would anyone bother, given odds like those?