OT- Sci-fi Oops

OK. I love sci-fi, especially the Star Trek series, all versions. However, I have one major complaint.

Funerals. All this space on board, all these options, and when someone dies and we have their body, there is a huge funeral, as if at sea, with the body in a large coffin-like metal casket, which is slid out into space and left behind. 

Now I understand that in years gone by, ships at sea did put bodies into the sea. They were not in caskets or even wooden coffins. They were wrapped in canvas and weighted with ballast, which meant they would decompose naturally. I suspect it would have been rather unhealthy to keep a bloating dead body on ship before we had electricity and a way to keep the body either cooled to prevent decomposition till one could land and bury it, especially on cross ocean voyages.  Having personally experienced the aroma of a body that was dead three days before it was found, I certainly agree with that policy, though I'm sure that the cruise liners and other ships at sea in this day do not dump their dead into the ocean. 

So back to sci-fi and the dead in caskets. You've got a ship in space and the potential to land on any nearby planet. You probably have cryo units for stasis, so why would you dump a casket into space?  The real reason - for the story line. 

For a limited resource ship in strange space, it seems that recycling would be the most likely scenario. But no, Voyager opted for the casket, which gets picked up by an alien species that reproduces by reanimating the dead and giving them a new, changed life, even to the point of changing the dead's DNA. 

Grave robbers, I say! And if they are, does that mean other alien life forms also dump their dead into space? Ewww!  Can  you imagine the clutter in a few millennia? If you have to use a casket, add a small guidance system and push it in the direction of the nearest star. 

Besides the risk of the grave robber aliens, what about enemy aliens who might either mimic your species or study your features and dna to find a way to defeat you?  

Nope, sorry.  I can understand  Captain Kirk sending a steel casket into space, he was hardly beyond the Neanderthal, but Janeway, you've disappointed me. Tsk. Tsk.

Mags out.