Precedent can be found in the canon before Abrams.

• "STNG: All Good Things". The Enterprise, commanded by Adm. Riker, attacks perpendicular to a Klingon's Z-axis.
• "Wrath Of Kahn", Spock observes a deficiency in Kahn's 2-dimensional battle tactics.

I suspect statements by the producers of the franchise suggesting a preference for the established orientation are simply rationalizations for operating within a restrictive FX budget.

For example. Roddenberry was noted as saying, "Transporter" technology was added because he couldn't figure out how to land the "Enterprise".

It seems to me that restricting the orientation in this fashion is a little silly, as the originators would not have done so, had they not been restricted by the technology of their time.

Of cause there are also the dozen or so DS9 shots showing the Defiant flying upside down, doing loops, flying vertically and "swimming" on its back.

So limiting our ships angles is un-cannon.

Paradise Lost -> Defiant fighting the Lakota, Upside down, and rolling around it self.
Sacrifice of Angels -> Defiant does loops.
For the Uniform -> Defiant pitches diagonally to avoid a colliding pylon.

And thoose are the ones I remember just like that.

In TNG there is also the "relics" episode, where the Enterprise pitches 100% vertically (while flying ahead), to get through the doors of the dysons sphere.

Of cause there is the Enterprise episode "The Expanse", there the NX class does a loop to get behind a BoP to kill it off.

It doesn't matter if it's budget constraints or not. For example, the reason the shows use humanoids over exotic aliens was budget constraints but it eventually got written into canon that the reason most species were humanoid was do to seeding from the old ones. Certain things create a certain style; especially after 726 episodes and 10 movies.

Canon just can't be you saying: "I don't like this so it's no longer canon." Canon's not about the individual's wants. It's about what's been represented to us for 5 decades.

I have no problem with loops or flying upside down. I'm just not fond of nearly straight up/down turning abiilty. You can have one without the other.

Im not sure what you mean by this... Elaborate please (preferably with youtube xD )

It was my understanding that the devs are increasing the up/down pitch to 85 degrees which is 5 less then 90: straight up/straight down, and nearly twice as much as the 45 degree pitch we have now. If that's the case you can effectively be flying level and turn almost straight up or down.

So... one can do loops... they just can't exit the loop before completing it?

As for canon, I don't recall ever seeing a ship in the franchise being forced to perform continuous "corkscrew" maneuvers in order to access points on it's z-axis.

Nowhere is it explained in "canon" why ships were limited in their angles of attack. It was filmed that way for a) budget constraints and b) because having ships flying around at odd angles didn't look pretty and would probably give some viewers vertigo.

That does not mean, by any stretch, that there was an "in character" reason why ships could not do loops, barrel rolls, immelmans, split S's, thatch weaves, and whatever other acrobatics a starship in a 3D frictionless environment might want to perform.

Babylon 5, by using total CGI for its space battle sequences, was the first show that used all 3 dimensions as well as real space physics. I can almost guarantee you that future Star Trek movies will also begin doing this. I doubt the movie directors are going to say, "Nope, it's canon for ships to move in this fashion so we can't have them doing fancy maneuvers."

Canon has been broken many times over for game purposes. A good example is weapon ranges. Today's military have underwater torpedoes that can hit a target at greater ranges than 10 km. I'm sure a photon torpedo can travel further than that. But to avoid having space battles where players are nailing each other from opposite ends of the maps, the ranges have been drastically reduced. In WWII, battleships slugged it out at ranges greater than 10km, and that's with no real targeting or tracking computers plus wind resistence, atmospheric effects, gravity, and other factors that can slow down a projectile. A photon torpedo fired in space can go tens of thousands of kilometers ... but not in the game.

Hey... 3D Movement IS canon...

Canon as in "shown on-screen"... SEVERAL times.

we also saw the defiant flying through huge ships like the dederidex hollow section, unleashing hell on their interior surface as it went, the ships sizes are so wrong in the game that the defiant can not fly through the dederidex hollow area....

but i agree due to how people exploit the current low angle limitation to make it nearly impossible to get back to fights in pvp due to them spiralling up for 15 minutes and you being unable to spiral effectively at full impulse to get there fast, that a steep angle near 90 would be nice, no need for back flips and rolls, people would abuse those due to being too lazy to keep their shields up.