There's a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.

Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.

I feel like there's a missing explanation of why "assimilating the diversity" of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.

It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of "we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need" worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.

It still gets me that the Ferengi were mostly unknown to the Federation, yet by the time of DS9 they're almost a widely known cornerstone of economics in the Alpha Quadrant.

I wish their neat energy whip came back though.

Hell of a twist if that was revealed after all the initial interactions. The ultimate grift to put the Federation off guard.

It's all in the writing, I guess. It'd be a kind of bungling, stumbling, weird encounter, random, campy, never know what they're going to do, villian.

*There were a decent villian in "Peak Performance" (the strategema episode). You just need that off species to be a counter.

More like the ultimate friend