MacGuffins and the art of storytelling

So Charlie Stross made a post recently about Ron Moore's description of the writing process on Star Trek: The Next Generation. (It's a short post--go read it and come back. I'll wait.) Now, I disagree with almost all of Charlie's conclusions--which isn't surprising--and I even disagree with half of his premise. He objects to Moore's process because it's bad science fiction. While I agree entirely that Moore's process isn't very good (o.O, I said on reading it and also O.o), I don't think scie...