Kirk & Picard's promotion: a desk job

[Whitestar]

In TOS final episode entitled, "Turnabout Intruder" Kirk and Janice Lester, a former lover of his exchanged bodies with an alien technology device. When the process was reversed, Starfleet immediately promoted Kirk to admiral and given a desk job after his mind-exchanging experience. They felt uneasy about giving him another command because they would always suspect that he would go insane. But on the surface, they apparently told him that the reason for his promotion was that he was the only captain to return a Constitution class starship in one piece. When Picard was recovering from his Borg ordeal in "The Best of Both Worlds Part II" and "Family", Starfleet should have realistically promoted Picard to a desk job just like in Kirk's case for the same reason. This would have opened up some interesting stories had the writers been given the freedom to do so, such as having Picard resigning from Starfleet, purchasing a ship of his own and teaming up with Riker now in command of the Enterprise to fight the Borg, while conducting archaelogical exhibitions in his spare time. As for Kirk, it would have been cool if he had bought a ship of his own and boldly go where no man has gone before, but without having the need to answer to Starfleet. Which is kind of a neat arrangement considering that Kirk never really fitted the Starfleet mole.