In Star Trek, Commander Data is socially awkward because he lacks training data. This might be because he was built and developed in isolation from the rest of society.
Could’ve sworn Data was built specifically to be that way because the prior model unnerved people, and also conspired to kill an entire camp of federation colonists.
He also learned more social skills with experience during the show, but retained some level of awkwardness from his early experiences. This is in line with how people work.
Technically he's a Spock stand in: hyper logical but not quite getting humanity.
This characteristic... In fact lots of characteristics get shared and mix and matched across DS9, TNG, and Voyager.
In Voyager Seven of Nine and The Doctor are the "not quite understanding humanity" characters. In DS9, it's Odo.
Ideally newer Trek would do this too, but it might also want to have:
A quirky or modded engineer: LaForge, O'Brien, Scotty, Be'lana.
A superior strength character: Spock, Data, Odo, Worf, Seven of Nine, Tuvok.
...and maybe a couple of psychic characters, Spock, Kes, Tuvok, Seven of Nine, Benjamin.
You'll probably also need some mentally brilliant characters, a Klingon, and someone who doesn't fit in due to a negative background and is jaded about it.
...a brilliant doctor helps too.
These characteristics are needed so you can write certain storyline types and stand alone episodes.
Data was very interested in becoming more human, thus the Pinocchio reference. Spock had bemused disdain for humans and had no desire to be more like them.
The use of the characters throughout the shows are as you described though, a useful foil to show humanity through.
Data is just information, while lore is storytelling. It's why Data's character is more clinical in behavior while his brother Lore is more chaotic and "human"
He lacks emotions. He can't understand what others are feeling because he doesn't feel things. He was built and developed with the human colonists where Soong worked. He lived with them, and their input shaped his programming; he was not kept in isolation apart from the society around them (though he did have those memories wiped when Soong implanted the memories of the colonists when the Crystalline Entity attacked). The only thing he lacks is an emotional understanding, since he has no emotions.
That was one of my thoughts, the amount of social data he could get from Starfleet Academy would be huge. Its not like he needed to study the material. I guess there's an argument that Data was only as social as he was because of the academy. Or maybe the computation needed to make the officer decisions are much more intensive than we think, contrary to what Lower Decks shows heh,kidding I love that show.
Yeah, but Data is actually intelligent and brilliant. ChatGPT is often just giving best averaged answers based on what's most likely - and still hallucinates even in the latest version.
I haven't used it, but it happens even in the demo they showed.