tech is FAR too advanced

I've seen grumbles of this here and there on these threads, I'm not voicing anything new here but after curing a little boredom this morning browsing the weyland site, especially the "electronics" page I'm wondering - if prometheus takes place in the Alien universe before the alien movies we've seen a million times, where was all this tech in Alien and Aliens? Am I going to have to pretend I'm a gullible 18 year old kid to enjoy this movie like I had to do to sit through phantom menace the first and only time I saw it? I appreciate all the time and thought that went into designing these things like the spectagraph, and the modular computing device, etc etc but it's WAY overkill on the tech side. Sorry I just don't buy the excuse that Alien was just truckers in space so they were using lower grade tech. If spectagraphs were available in 2073, wouldn't they also be available A CENTURY LATER in 2179 (when Aliens supposedly took place)? Finding Newt would have been a cinch had Ripley just used a spectagraph!! There had better be far more giger design in this flick than there is fancy tech design. I feel the same sense of (Art) Director Fail that I had in the weeks leading up to the release of phantom menace. No sci fi director has ever been able to successfully pull this prequel thing off yet, and I fear prometheus is going to fall into that pile. It's cool eye candy but terribly flawed from a chronology standpoint from all I've seen so far. It will be hard to get past that for me. I wish some director one day will be able to successfully pull off a believable prequel, cause all this tech 100 years earlier is just insulting. I think to have convincingly pulled off the chronology from a technology standpoint would have been far more impressive to me than all the sexy looking medpods, spaceships all driven by sexy looking glowing multi-color touchscreens. Nostromo had a monochrome CLI a century later for christs sake!!!