Warp is as fast as the story requires
Just like shields and structural integrity being only as good as the plot requires.
Man… one of those episodes, beginning of the battle, they got hit only twice and then, “shields down to 6 percent, Captain”. Then they proceed to take another 15 disruptor/photon/whatever blasts. These writers are on crack sometimes.
And when the shields get bypassed, the crew is only as smart as the plot requires (see: Generations).
It’s the Center of the Galaxy, like the Center of Disease Control or the Center for African American Studies.
Or the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good.
Actually, there was just a lot of downtime between shots of STV. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy spent about 40 years in that brig cell waiting for Scott to break them out. By the time they made it back home they had caught up to the TNG era. That’s why Worf was able to serve as as defense attorney in the trial in STVI. It’s obvious when you think about it.
My headcannon: having read the Absolutely 100% canon books “Q-zone, W-Strike, and Q-space”, my personal belief is that since Q is partially responsible for the entity in the center claiming to be god, Q decided to artificially speed up their journey to the barrier and back home. Nobody on the ship brought it up because nobody was even thinking about travel time in the middle of all that.
Reading between the lines of The Nth Degree, one might suppose the entity was a Cytherian, who granted Sybok the knowledge to get the ship, as would later happen with Barclay. And maybe the other Cytherians helped them get back home as well?
Of course, this all contradicts my preferred theory was that there was no entity. At least, not until Sybok arrived and found his supposed “Eden” to be an empty wasteland. Unable to deal with his whole belief system falling apart, his subconscious leveraged his advanced mental abilities to conjure an appropriate godlike being. But of course, like him, it was a little bit mad…
Fun fact: Cytherean is the demonym for Venus.
Wow, I did not know that! The TNG crew met Venusians from the centre of the galaxy. That’s wonderful.
Could also be a rogue Cytherian who gave Sybock the Nth Degree probe flash which is what compelled him to the center.
The ship’s top speed is proportional to the speed of the narrative.
Alternate theory: the “center of the galaxy” was just an elaborate prank on the crew
“should we tell him it takes a couple decades?”
“Nah, just set course for the next interesting thing and tell it’s the center. He’ll believe it”
