Yes, as I recall, the original backstory (published in Starlog, maybe?) was that the advanced aliens had built him to atone for accidentally destroying the colony where he was found. Of course, then Robert Lewin had a better idea.
I question "better." "Datalore" didn't really make any sense, a casualty of the sloppy writing in season 1 -- nobody knows where Data came from, yet everyone's heard of Dr. Noonian Soong, the only roboticist who believed a positronic brain like Data's could work? If they knew about Soong's theories already, shouldn't it have been obvious from the start that Data was his work? Which was made far, far stupider in retrospect when "Brothers" established that Data looked exactly like the young Soong.
Also, the original idea was that Data had the memories of the dead colonists stored inside him -- not just their journals as in "Silicon Avatar," but their actual memories, maybe even their personalities. That was a potentially rich and fascinating element that was completely abandoned.
True. I didn't mean to imply they were only that. But I feel Riker, Decker and younger Kirk are cut from the same cloth.
Yes, that was the intent in
Phase II, that Decker was a "younger Kirk" that the more mature Kirk would take under his wing and mentor, the way Picard was intended to be the mentor for action-hero Riker before Patrick Stewart broke out and became more the center of attention.
See, David Gerrold (who co-created TMP but was robbed of credit for it) had argued in his nonfiction book
The World of Star Trek that it made no sense for the captain of the ship to be the action hero leading the away missions, so he advocated for focusing on a specialized "contact team" of junior officers that would handle the dangers while the captain stayed behind. The original intent in TNG, before Stewart stole the show, was that the Kirk-like action hero would be the first officer this time, and the captain would be a more passive mentor/advisor figure.
With Troi, I'm referring to her psionic powers and half human ancestry, which are a lift from Spock. Xon is also a flipped Spock.
No, Troi's empathic powers are a lift from Ilia, as I said. Riker & Troi's backstory and relationship are
exactly the same as Decker & Ilia's, and even their names are similar, as are the names of the characters' home planets (Delta IV and Betazed, both derived from Greek letters). We saw little of Ilia's empathic powers in TMP (basically only when she eased Chekov's pain), but they would've been a major part of her character in
Phase II. Also TNG: "The Child" was rewritten from a
Phase II script, substituting Troi for Ilia. And the bit about nude Betazoid weddings in "Haven" was an echo of the sexual openness the Deltans were intended to have.
I'll concede that the idea of Troi being half-human is recycled from Spock. But that's the only thing that is.
I wouldn't call Xon a "flipped Spock" so much as a contrast to Spock, though it's a subtle distinction.
