My follow up:
1. re: pop culture bleed-through: ok, but why does Pete only listen to pre-late 80s hits? He doesn't like any song released between 88 and 2014? Is it sentimentality, a devotion to his mother's specially-chosen set list?
2. Honestly I hated that ST:TNG episode (i.e., The Quest for Intelligent Design), but I (grudgingly) accept it as a possibility, at least to explain humanoid body types. But that doesn't explain the fashion choices, with the Xandarian merchant wearing a very Earth-like jacket and tie. Also, see my note at the end.
I'd even be ok with the homogenized galactic culture except that we've previously seen (at least) three other major races/cultures in the universe that aren't picture-perfect copies of early 21st century America: Asgard, Jotunheim, and the Chitauri, none of which matches current US of A. Why is the Nova Corp so beholden to current American aesthetics?
3. Ok, fair point.
4. Well, it calls the whole operation into question. If five knuckleheads can defeat the gulag in under an hour, then every other person who's ever been in that prison is an idiot. It's less a fearsome prison than a Keystone Cops skit.
5. That would indeed be a formidable super power
6. But still weird. Why not Afternoon Delight while she's at it?
7. If that were the case, then he wouldn't have bothered to retrieve the tape from the guard at the gulag
8. Same as #7: If it were a 3D printed Walkman/headphones, then he'd simply have 3-D printed a new set.
9. Same as above
10. I don't mind Thanos' appearance but rather his animation. Vader looks as real as anything else on screen with him, and the Hulk looks as real a green guy you'd see at the gym. But Thanos looks like a cartoon hastily pasted into an otherwise reasonably convincing CGI environment.
11. Gamora is known to have participated in genocide, explicitly shown to have enemies spanning the galaxy. But she does the Nova Corps a solid, so she's effectively pardoned? Well, that's kind of a big thumb in the eye to the billions dead and the millions who mourn them. It's nice that she helped stop Ronan and all, but there's a ton of people with a legitimate grievance against her, so the Nova Corps undermines its legitimacy by letting her off the hook.
I'm down with the possibility of a Babel fish (and with a fenced-off Earth), but we can't simply assume it. HGTTG spells it out in detail, while Star Trek and The Last Starfighter use essentially the same gimmick. Hell, even the utterly terrible Legends of Tomorrow series pauses to explain how their version works. It would take two seconds of screen time, so if Guardians wants us to believe that they're using a Babel fish, then they need to mention it.
You're obviously correct that sci-fi is not intended as an accurate prediction of future reality (that's futurism), so I'm fine with the Guardians universe not matching our own. But the Guardians universe doesn't currently match the MCU, and that's the problem.
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