How many more skeletons does Starfleet have hiding in its closets?

That is the key question asked by an "editorial" posted onto a Star Wars fansite. It all makes a certain sense in hindsight. As Leah Brahms (designer of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D's warp propulsion) states:

We had to do it that way. There's no way the ship could have gone as fast as it did with a conventional warp drive. None. We tried three nacelle designs, four nacelle, even six nacelle. Nothing. No configuration would work. Our only option was to either shrink the ship, which Starfleet wouldn't let us do, or create a contained overreaction inside the core and use the dilithium matrix to prevent the reaction from running out of control. Basically, every time the ship's drive was online, there'd need to be constant, 100% control over the reaction, or else it would blow. We never in a million years though Starfleet would accept the design, but they did.