I still haven't finished The Orville S1 (I think I got through most of it though). It's definitely something I intend to get back to, despite a multitude of problems I have with the show. Just like Discovery I expect them to tweak the show over time though, and hopefully Seth himself takes less writing credits because I just don't think he's a particularly good writer, and Trek type stories pretty much live and die by the script.
Meanwhile, I saw Episode 2 of Discovery S2. Funny you mention how un-Treklike Discovery is, because if this is an indication of what's to come, it's a confirmation of what episode 1 was suggesting, that they're stepping back into a Trek-style episodic show with a subplot throughline connecting it all. To be honest this to me is both a good and bad thing; I think we've talked about in the past how one of the problems with some of the Trek shows is that they became to complacent in its formula (TNG being new-TOS for its initial seasons and DS9/VOY both being very TNG-like in their early days). Sticking with that can work, but obviously with the same core group of people running the show for like a decade and a half (Berman, Barga, Taylor, and even Piller) the stories eventually got tired or unwatchable. To be fair The Orville did have a handful of episodes that I think did the formula quite well, updated for modern topics (The sex-change baby one was decent, and the social media one was pretty good if you overlook how the entire problem was caused by how idiotic LaMar was acting), so maybe all it takes is some new eyes at the formula.
Anyway this episode was just banal Trek stuff done a million times. It was about a splintered group of humans who are mysteriously in the Beta Quadrant (Discovery can still mushroom-teleport everywhere, angering canon nerds everywhere), and the mystery itself is actually never solved, because that's the subplot of this season. The suggestion by the episode is that there's some kind of God-like space entity doing this, so I guess that's classic Trek stuff, but it does kinda hurt the episode's own standalone mystery. The rest of the episode was basically Prime Directive stuff that's been debated about 12 dozen times throughout Trek, with nothing really new to show for it this time. At least it wasn't at fucking stupid as Enterprise's Prime Directive episode though (Dear Doctor), or even some of Voyager's Prime Directive episodes (like Time and Again) because the Discovery crew isn't a bunch of genocidal maniacs.