I've always been a fan of the canon interpretation that anything other than the two nacelle pattern was because someone needed to compensate for something in the workload. Battleships (Federation-class variants, Galaxy-X) have 3 so one can get chopped off and they can keep on trucking, quads rotate through them to even wear/allow 'sprinting' for longer, singletons being 2 nacelles in a trenchcoat for cost/maintenance reasons (which explains why they're often proportionally oversized), etc.
It could just be that the holodeck noise dampening isn't working today, and sleep deprived Boimler doesn't think to just call engineering to go fix it?
I love this actually. Kirk, probably top 5% percent against the Gorn captain who happened to be some ancient, arthritic, half blind, one foot in the grave, and still beat his ass all over the paramount back lot.
Can we talk about how great it is that they keep tinkering with the opening credits for the special episodes? Because I love it every time they do. Fukkin acapella man.