TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Or at least DISCO had used its 31st century setting to explore sci-fi concepts around any of these ideas. Like full on Iain M Banks The Culture, restoring people from their most recent mind state back up.

The T.O.G. has a moratorium on unauthorized cloning, and you DON'T. EVER. disobey T.O.G. directives.

I think a good part of the reason they never addressed this is that there's no good answer. Any answer that posits it to be impossible that I can think of comes with awkward connections to the idea of a 'soul' or some such nonsense that makes duplicates non-viable, which I'm sure they really didn't want to introduce.

After all, it's not like transporters were part of a well thought out extensively considered backstory when they were first introduced. As I understand it, the issue was they didn't have the budget to keep shooting shuttlecraft scenes in every episode, so they came up with a way they could get the characters to the planet without having to use a vehicle in most situations. This decision has had its upsides and downsides, but I think on the whole, it has created far more issues than it ever solved. This is far from the only plot point that has issues in order for story to work with transporters. And considering how often they encounter situations where the transporters don't work, from an in-universe perspective the technology seems...unwise...to use on exploratory vessels.

One which, I imagine, will only ever be hinted at, but never embraced.

They did a resurrection in Star Trek lower decks

It's easy for me to say with no time pressure and having had years to think it over, but I think rapidly decaying memory integrity would solve that issue. Saying a person's data was large and complex and pushed even the limits of the technology would explain why they couldn't just digitize everybody. The computer can only hold one pattern at a time and/or it degrades quickly.

This same caveat could also create limit on the amount and complexity of matter that could be transported, as well as create drama around technological arms races to build better computers to transport more crew at a time giving an edge to boarding parties to one side of a war.

template's here, if anyone wants it

High praise from one of our resident memeologists! thanks! <3

She probably asked "How are you feeling, Reg?"

Uhhh... ask Keiko...

It's already established that transporters can edit someone's DNA, so that would be a way to prevent aging and treating genetic diseases. If you have a way to duplicate the buffers then you could make a backup for cases when someone dies from an accident at the cost of a few hours of memories.

TNG s6e4 "Relics" demonstrated the ability to sustain a buffer pattern almost indefinitely.

It was always my understanding, that people are stored digitally in the transporter buffer, so of course they could be stored there for extended periods of time. That's also why I was surprised when people argued that you cant copy people with the teleporter. For me it always was a remote replicator