They could have gone the long road and let the series play over the course of multiple decades. Showing longterm development, skip some years every episode and display how people, relationships and technology evolve over time. Could even started with a freshmen boarding the NX-01 and ending it with him becoming captain, Admiral and finally dying after an fullfilled live at the dawn of the new federation. With the long live of the vulcans, time-dillitation and the occasional timetravel they would have even enough tools to hold some characters fresh enough for the whole series.
They moved in this direction a bit, particularly in S4, which was ultimately my favorite and makes me wish the show continued on. In particular, the evolution of Earth-Vulcan relationship was some deep worldbuilding.
The possibility of main power being something other than antimatter also gives a reason why the TOS Romulan warbird was powered by “simple impulse” (which elsewhere seems to be fusion), and how on Earth Lily Sloane and Zefram Cochrane were able to power the Phoenix given the post-WW3 apocalypse and “six months to scrounge up enough titanium just to build a four-meter cockpit”.
I think your worldbuilding would suit something earlier than Enterprise, but Enterprise was just before the foundation of the Federation, so I think they needed roughly the level of imbalance in the show — that said, one of my pet peeves is the way differences in skill/biology/technology/industrial output get squashed in narratives; the usual example I give is that Hawkeye and Thor shouldn’t be in the same battlespace in the same way that an olympic archer and a main battle tank shouldn’t be, but a developmentally realistic depiction of space battle with Vulcans and NX-01 (given time since becoming interstellar) ought to be similar to putting King Polydorus and his army in a fight with the entirety of all branches of the USA armed forces.