I remember in TNG that Deanna outranked Ensign Ro despite being ship's counselor despite command experience

Hey check out me skimming back through your reboot tag. For the record, this is explicitly stated in TNG to be because Troi ranked lieutenant commander and Ro was an ensign: i.e., the issue was that with all of the command staff that'd normally be in charge out of the picture, they fell back on rank. I've always thought of it as there being a set of command officers for whom the order is spelled out (kind of like how the first five steps of presidential succession is spelled out in the U.S. constitution and the next bunch by federal law, even though there isn't really anything else that says, like, the Secretary of Agriculture is more important than the Secretary of Commerce), and then beyond that, rank, and presumably beyond that, seniority.

Is Sulu even a cadet, or is he a recent grad? I doubt that every single person on the Enterprise is a cadet, even if a large number of them are. I also know that Pike addresses Sulu as "lieutenant" when he messes up their warp out, not as cadet. A couple scenes later, Pike calls Uhura "cadet". I'm referring to how Pike addresses them because there's obviously the issue of Uhura carrying lieutenant rank as a cadet, but that's two instances where Pike is referring to officers he doesn't know: same speaker, presumably the same criteria for determining how he should address them.

The command structure of the Enterprise is obviously under heavy flux during the movie, but to start off with, I suspect that Sulu outranks Uhura--if nothing else, they have the same rank, and Sulu is command (yellow shirt) while Uhura apparently falls under the category of security and engineering (red shirt).

Um. that's all. <relurk>