For those of you here who think the prime directive is flawed, or could be adjusted.
What do you agree with, how would you change what you disagree with, and why?
My biggest (only real) gripe with it is the "sit by and watch a civilisation die from something we could prevent inside five minutes without ever being noticed" shtick.
The Prime Directive is not a bad idea when it exists to minimise harm. When it gets turned into a pseudo-religious dogma, where it is considered better to allow a culture to be extinguished than to risk contaminating it, that's when there are problems for me.
Zero tolerance policies ensure injustice in outlier cases. Yes, it’s unethical to interfere in a civilization’s development 99.9% of the time, but there are always exceptions. Ignoring outliers is pretending your system is above the fundamental laws of the universe.
My theory -- based on us seeing numerous violations of the Prime Directive from main characters -- is that the interpretation of the rule is "you better be willing to risk your career if you break this," not "your career is 100% over if you break this."
It's a heuristic, and a good one, but there seems to be in-universe exceptions for exceptional cases.
