I've always hated and disbelieved in that episode. Not only does everyone but Scotty behave as if they just joined Starfleet yesterday, but even Spock is written badly. Most writers, actors, producers, and directors have little or no scientific training, which means that most people who've EVER written Star Trek -- including the authors of canon -- don't understand how a scientist sees the world or what kinds of things a scientist would think or say or do.

It's very common in science fiction (especially media SF, as opposed to books) to have a scientist character who makes flat pronouncements about what is definitely going on and what will definitely happen. And good scientists don't DO that in novel situations; any scientist worth the name knows that the first duty of scientist is to OBSERVE and to gather data. A scientist with any sort of training at all has been educated to make tentative predictions unless the data are both massive and overwhelmingly conclusive.

So Spock would not confidently assert that the creatures on Taurus II would do this, that, or the other thing; he'd know that he doesn't have enough data about these creatures to make even tentative predictions.

I also think that a scientist of Spock's caliber would have observed humans for long enough to understand that to manage such an emotional species, one must also manage their emotions. (He served under Christopher Pike for more than eleven years, for heaven's sake, so even if Spock HADN'T had a human mother, he's been exposed to humans for more than a decade now, more than enough time to have understood many essentials about working with humans.)

I don't know if it's Oliver Crawford and S. Bar David who are guilty of this, or if it's the result of the script polish that Steven Carabatsos did or if it's because of the rewrites that Gene Coon did -- maybe it's all of them. But the authors of this script have Spock behaving like a bad scientist, in addition to having the others behave like bad Starfleet officers.

To my mind, even Scotty behaved like a bad Starfleet officer, because while he didn't rag on Spock, he also didn't stop the others from doing so, and as the highest-ranking person aboard the ship who wasn't Spock, I'd think he'd have said, "Hey, that's enough of that" to Boma and McCoy.

I don't know if you've read it, but KCS has a nice little story that follows up this episode, too.

McCoy's attitude toward Spock bothers me so much that I've written two different stories fixing it. In "Reining in McCoy," I have Kirk call McCoy on the carpet, and in "Physician, Heal Thyself," I have McCoy learn to be a better man by being temporarily posted to an all-Vulcan ship.