Cheapjack: I was going to be polite, but I lost that version of my post. Hence, I'm too aggravated to bother being polite.
You're basically barging into...this is the second thread of mine so far...And saying we're not proper Trek fans because we don't believe as you do. Because we dare to decide for the purposes of something else entirely that the UFP uses standard economics, or that the "evolved society" stuff is propaganda.
Go away. Please. You want to argue those things, create a thread about them. I'll be happy to argue them there.
But don't, don't go about presuming you somehow have the right to declare what a proper Trek fan believes.
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With that said: I figured it'd be best to put, in Q&A format, what seem to be the most common objections I haven't yet addressed (or if I have I lost track):
Q1. This all takes too long.
A1. Yes, it does. (5-7 years at minimum, I figure, from discovery of the planet to landing of the colonization party.) This is, however, meant to describe situations nearly ideal - where the UFP has the luxury of time to "do colonization properly". Member State colonization may go faster. Colonization of sites of scientific or military interest may have a timeline that is heavily compressed by comparison. Unofficial ventures hardly need to follow this layout. But this is the process that makes a colony an official UFP civilian colony. It has the most support of any of those colony types before the mission sets out, while it is en route, and when it arrives at the planet, not to mention afterward. (Military and scientific endeavors respectively may not have the same pre-mission planning and coordination, among other things.)
Q2. The colonies described here seem really small.
A2. They are. My gut instinct puts the Initial Landing Party of a colony at no more than 2,000 people. This is tiny for a planetary scale. But Trek colonies seem to swing randomly between really tiny and utterly huge. It seemed better writing to describe a colony as starting out small. I cannot explain, not in a way that makes sense, how a colony can get to millions or billions using established TNG-era ship sizes (which generally are less than 3,000 people even on the largest ships) and a time span less than a century. That's with incredibly optimistic natural growth rates, too.
Q3. But....replciators!
A3. Ah, the replicator. Seems to blow everything off course! Replicators for food (by the TNG tech manual, first printing (Nov 1991), page 153-154) are definitely implied to be a second choice over real food. They're like institutional food today, a step above MREs or traditional space-food, but not by much. When any character can get it, they seem to prefer real food. For tools, keep in mind that you need raw materials and you're working at strictly molecular resolution. You can replicate a lot of spare parts, but not everything.
Finally, replicators themselves are said to take a lot of energy. If there are two things a colonization mission does not have, it is spare mass and spare energy. Replicators definitely seem to require more energy than a simple fusion reactor can put out.
