Why are the Borg obsessed with Humans / Earth?

[MrJ]

Seriously, I don't know how you guys manage to completely read through those enormous posts interleaved with quotes and comments.

Me neither... Oh well here goes.

Starfleet is a Military organization whose many duties involve not just exploration, but also the defence of the Federation. Yeah the big decisions would be made by the pencil pushers, but as I already said: that also means that they could meet new enemies and it is completely moronic to hide information from them about the Borg, no matter how remote a chance of them meeting them.

As Sci said, the Federation probably gets hundreds of such rumours. Is it going to brief each captain about every single one of them?

Yeah it will. Every day each Captain gets fleet wide situation reports or "sitreps" about what other Captains are up to. Obviously some would be more important than others, some would be more interesting than others, and some the Captain would just skim or not even read at all. However they would all be uploaded into the ships computer in case something came up and they needed to google it.

Why the fuck would Starfleet consider the 22nd century Borg incident to be a more valuable a secret than Earths defence codes? They wouldn't.

So if the Federation doesn't consider the Borg important, why would the brief each captain about them?

I'm not saying that the Federation didn't consider the Borg important. I'm just saying that it didn't make sense for Starfleet to be more concerned about keeping knowledge of the Borg from Starfleet Captains in case the enemy got a hold of them, than they were about things like Federation defence codes.

Archer beat a crappy 22nd century Earth transport that the Borg quickly assimilated and upgraded to make it more than a match to the NX-01 Enterprise. They never saw what a totally Borg ship from that era is capable of. They must have known that if they can turn a civilian transport into such a warship in a few days, their actual warships must have been formidable, much more than anything Starfleet had. And 200 years later they could only have gotten better.

If they never saw what the Borg were capable of, how can you say this?

With a simple investigative tool called: "deduction". By seeing the lethal killing machine the Borg were able to build in a few days using a human civilian transport, even the most unimaginative Starfleet Admiral could have deduced that an actual Borg ship would be quite dangerous.

Because, and I hate to have to repeat my self again, but I said this: It's hard to make a parallel between the Navy today to Starfleet in the 24th century.

You're the one who brought up the comparrison.

Not really, all I started with was comparing the Borg to a modern day minefield, that might have been a mistake. It was you who used the comparison of two hundred year old intel:

Are navy captains today routinely told about things that were kept secret two hundred years ago?

The only thing that could compare to the Borg on Earth's oceans would be a Kraken, Godzilla, or the Cloverfield monster, something that appears from time to time and destroys costal cities.

Which is why every navy captain is briefed about the Bermuda Triangle, perhaps?

The Bermuda Triangle isn't the only place on Earth where our navigation instruments get screwy. And yeah we get briefed on them too.

Except, the Borg already made contact with the Federation before "Q Who" in "The Neutral Zone".

And given that all indications are that the vessel responsible for that then left the area, it seems like it was on a simple scouting mission, not an attack on the Federation.

A simple scouting mission which resulted in loss of life to both the Romulan Star Empire and UFP, and almost started a war between the two.
But that wasn't the point I was making, you cut out the rest of that paragraph. I was replying to your comment that if Q hadn't done anything, contact with the Borg couldn't have happened for decades. Obviously the Neutral Zone attack was a scouting mission. Scouting missions are usually done before an attack.

And why would contact with the Borg take decades without Q? The Borg modified a 22nd century Earth transport that could barely go warp 2 and in a few days could go warp 5. It is pretty easy to guess that the Borg probably had very advanced ships that could go faster than anything the Federation had. Hell, the Federation was experimenting with Transwarp Drive in the 23rd century. Shouldn't Starfleet have thought that it would be more than likely that the Borg already had Transwarp at that time?

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Earlier you were saying that the Federation would have had very little information about the Borg. Now you are saying that the Federation should have been aware of the Borg's technical capabilities based solely on a single brief encounter. You really think Starfleet is into such extreme speculation?

I don't recall saying that the Federation would have very little information about the Borg. I said that from the information they got from Archers crew they could easily use the evidence at hand to determine how advanced the Borg were. Just as if a crew goes to a planet and it's inhabitants most advanced tools are stone knives and bear skins, chances are good that they don't have energy weapons or warp drive.

Why would the Collective waste its time going after outposts in the Alpha quadrant when it can get the same stuff much closer to home? I don't know, I'm not trying to explain the Borg justification for anything.

Again, you seem to be contradicting yourself. Earlier you were claiming that the federation would have had contact with the Borg very soon, even if not for the actions of Q,

Yeah...

and now you are saying that there was no reason for the Borg to be there.

No, they had a reason, being that their whole purpose is adding the biological and technological differences of other races to their own to make them stronger. It seems logical for them to be curious about the Romulans and Federation. They were probably doing the same thing in the Gamma Quadrant too. I just didn't care to explain what they were doing in the Neutral zone.

So it seems likely (since we know the Borg WERE there) that the vessel from TNZ was just a simple scouting mission. Which is exactly what I have been saying.

Yeah me too. It was a scouting mission, that was a prelude to an invasion. An invasion that it seems that Q, in his own way was warning Picard about since "Encounter at Farpoint"

I have been saying this whole time that Starfleet Captains should have been told about the Borg ever since Archer met them. Throughout the 23rd and 24th centuries it should have been just general info that a Captain is given, like how a Klingon disrupter works, or a Romulan plasma torpedo or what is the capital of the Tzenkethi home world. Just, info that could be useful someday, but probably is just useless. Something that the Captain is told once in a briefing and it either stays in the back of his or her mind or they forget it after being told.

Except that knowledge of how a disrupter works, or Romulan plasma torpedos, or the capital of Tzenketh is stuff that captains would routinely be using. Knowledge of something that happened 200 years ago and has had only rumours of things that happened in far distant reaches of the galaxy since is not.

If a Captain was assigned to the other side of the Federation from where Tzenkethi was, his knowledge of the capital wouldn't do much good, unless he was a contestant on the 24th century's version of Jeopardy.

You keep using 200 years as if it is a long time. It is when used in terms of current day politics and human lifespan. But not when used on a galactic scale. Starfleet knew that the Borg Archer encountered where a hostile race. They knew the Borg sent a message to the Delta Quadrant, presumambly to their homeworld, giving them the location of Earth. They knew that it would take about 200 years, within the life span of a Vulcan, for the message to reach the Borg. They knew the Borg were extreamly advanced and could proabably travell through space faster than Starfleet ships. So it would make sense to assume that an attack from the Borg could come at some point in the latter half of the 24th centaury. So yeah, in this case at least, knowledge about something that happened 200 years ago is pretty important.

But once the Enterprise met the Borg at system J-25 and confirmed that the Borg were responsible for the destruction of the Neutral Zone outposts. Starfleet should have been like: "Ok, we have known about this for 200 years now, and we have been expecting a possible attack from them. It's a good thing we have been preparing to fight them for the last 200 years. Working on defeating their personal shields and such."

But obviously that didn't happen because, as I said before the Enterprise Borg episode was a retcon and a stupid one at that.

Preparing how? How much information do you think that the NX 01 crew was able to get?

Archer's crew got almost as much information from their encounter with the Borg as Picards did with their's 200 years later. The human Scientists took pictures of and studied the Borg corpses and the Borg debris. Phlox studied and ultimately defeated the Borg Nanoprobes, saw first had the assimilation process and was connected with the collective and the hive mind. Archer fought Borg drones and saw their adaptive, regenerative personal shields. Also there was the ships internal security cameras recording the whole thing. They boarded the Borgified ship and saw Borg tech up close. They fought with the Borgified ship and saw it's Borg weapons, and regenerative hull. So other than not learning the name of these mysterious "Cybermen" they learned pretty much the same things Picard and his crew learned 200 years later. Using what they learned against the Borg in the 22nd century they could have been quite prepared 200 years later, but they weren't.

It just occurred to me that your argument is rather contradictory. You say that the Borg weren't important enough to tell Starfleet Captains about before "Q Who". But information about the Borg was so super ultra top secret that Starfleet considered the intel on them to be more important than the defence codes to Earth. And so highly classified that there wasn't a single piece of information about the Borg in the Enterprise's massive computer database before "Q who". So which is it? It can't be both. It can't be too trivial to tell Captains about at the same time it's too important to let Captains know because the knowledge might fall into enemy hands.

After Archer's encounter, it would have been classified top secret.

Probably. But we have seen Starfleet Captains have access to Top Secret intelligence before.

And after two centuries with nothing but rumour about the Borg, probably no one in Starfleet thought they were a serious threat.

Possibly... Except for that omminus warning about them attacking 200 years later.

There's no evidence to say that this would have resulted in Starfleet deciding to make that information not top secret anymore though.

Why not? the Normandy invasion in WWII was one of the most highly classified military operations in World History. Yet between the Hollywood movies, HBO miniseries, History Channel documentaries and High school history classes about it almost every aspect of the invasion is a well known fact. And that was only 67 years ago.

I'm sure most of the things that we saw Kirk do in TOS and the movies where classified, yet by the 24th Century almost every Starfleet Officer, and Icheb, knew almost everything we knew he did.

But even if they had, do you really think picard was going to go investigating it?

No He was busy. Even Starfleet Intelligence whose job it would have been to investigate, or cover up the Borg, would probably be more focused on the Parasite infestation of Starfleet Command that had just happened prior to the events of "The Neutral Zone".

How often do you see people today rushing off to investigate things that were classified top secret when Australia was being settled as a convict colony?

All the time, their called Historians, it's kind of what they do.

The Hansen's research probably would have been considered top secret, because Starfleet knew enough that going out to investigate them was a bad idea, but bear in mind that this was going out to find the Borg, which is very different to the Borg coming here.

The whole Hansen/Raven thing is another retcon of the Borg I don't feel like bothering with.

BTW, did I ever say anything about the defense codes to Earth?

No, but you did say:

And captains and starships are the most likely ones to get captured for information - it happened in Chain of Command. So why would Starfleet give information like that out to how many hudreds of people?

But then I said:

Every Starship in Starfleet holds the prefix codes to all the other ships in Starfleet to disable them. Captains know command codes to their ships and often the command codes to the Federations defences. When Nero was interrogating Pike he wasn't interested in anything that happened a hundred years ago to a ship named Enterprise that we never heard about in the 23rd or 24th centuries. Why the fuck would Starfleet consider the 22nd century Borg incident to be a more valuable a secret than Earths defence codes? They wouldn't.

I was just using the defence codes to Earth as an example. Starfleet gave captains and Starship computer databases the Command codes to places like Earth, even though they could get captured by the enemy. But you said that Starfleet wouldn't give them Borg info because it could get captured. It just seems like an odd thing to worry about an enemy taking.

 

[Tiberius]

Yeah it will. Every day each Captain gets fleet wide situation reports or "sitreps" about what other Captains are up to. Obviously some would be more important than others, some would be more interesting than others, and some the Captain would just skim or not even read at all. However they would all be uploaded into the ships computer in case something came up and they needed to google it.

Woul;d it brief Picard about such a thing when it is 200 years old? Even the most recent verifiable Borg thing was the rescue of the El Aurians during the launch of the Enterprise B. Not exactly recent, and certainly not something that would be communicated to Picard in a sitrep.

I'm not saying that the Federation didn't consider the Borg important. I'm just saying that it didn't make sense for Starfleet to be more concerned about keeping knowledge of the Borg from Starfleet Captains in case the enemy got a hold of them, than they were about things like Federation defence codes.

Like I said, after so long with no direct contact, the Federation just didn't see the point.

With a simple investigative tool called: "deduction". By seeing the lethal killing machine the Borg were able to build in a few days using a human civilian transport, even the most unimaginative Starfleet Admiral could have deduced that an actual Borg ship would be quite dangerous.

But no way to test that deduction. And for all they knew, the technology on the assimilated transport was the best the Borg had to offer. Given that it was defeated by an old NX class ship, no reason to tell Picard about it.

The Bermuda Triangle isn't the only place on Earth where our navigation instruments get screwy. And yeah we get briefed on them too.

You're in the navy? They actually have a few days where they sit you down and tell you about the Bermuda Triangle and how to deal with the problems it causes?

A simple scouting mission which resulted in loss of life to both the Romulan Star Empire and UFP, and almost started a war between the two.

I meant as far as the Borg were concerned.

But that wasn't the point I was making, you cut out the rest of that paragraph. I was replying to your comment that if Q hadn't done anything, contact with the Borg couldn't have happened for decades. Obviously the Neutral Zone attack was a scouting mission. Scouting missions are usually done before an attack.

But not solely for that reason.

I don't recall saying that the Federation would have very little information about the Borg. I said that from the information they got from Archers crew they could easily use the evidence at hand to determine how advanced the Borg were. Just as if a crew goes to a planet and it's inhabitants most advanced tools are stone knives and bear skins, chances are good that they don't have energy weapons or warp drive.

That;s fine if you are looking at primitive technology. But when you are looking at technology that is far more advanced than anything you have, it gets harder to tell. All you can do is say that it is much more advanced than anything you have. Archer's crew wouldn't have been able to get much useful information about the Borg they recovered.

No, they had a reason, being that their whole purpose is adding the biological and technological differences of other races to their own to make them stronger. It seems logical for them to be curious about the Romulans and Federation. They were probably doing the same thing in the Gamma Quadrant too. I just didn't care to explain what they were doing in the Neutral zone.

Wait, so was the Borg in TNZ on a scouting mission, or an assimilation mission? You're contradicting yourself, I think.

Yeah me too. It was a scouting mission, that was a prelude to an invasion. An invasion that it seems that Q, in his own way was warning Picard about since "Encounter at Farpoint"

There's no reason to show that a scouting mission MUST be a prelude to invasion.

If a Captain was assigned to the other side of the Federation from where Tzenkethi was, his knowledge of the capital wouldn't do much good, unless he was a contestant on the 24th century's version of Jeopardy.

If a Captain was two centuries after the only known borg/earth contact, his knowledge of the contact wouldn't do much good, unless he was a contestant on the 24th century's version of Jeopardy.

You keep using 200 years as if it is a long time. It is when used in terms of current day politics and human lifespan. But not when used on a galactic scale. Starfleet knew that the Borg Archer encountered where a hostile race. They knew the Borg sent a message to the Delta Quadrant, presumambly to their homeworld, giving them the location of Earth. They knew that it would take about 200 years, within the life span of a Vulcan, for the message to reach the Borg. They knew the Borg were extreamly advanced and could proabably travell through space faster than Starfleet ships. So it would make sense to assume that an attack from the Borg could come at some point in the latter half of the 24th centaury. So yeah, in this case at least, knowledge about something that happened 200 years ago is pretty important.

And they say what? "Hey guys, two hundred years ago Archer met up with these unpleasant cybernetic dudes. They sent a message and we think they might be here any day now, but unfortunately Archer's crew found out sod all about them because they didn't have the familiarity or the ability to conduct the sort of tests they needed to do in order to tell us how to defeat them."

Archer's crew got almost as much information from their encounter with the Borg as Picards did with their's 200 years later.

I disagree.

The human Scientists took pictures of and studied the Borg corpses and the Borg debris.

Which don't tell very much. How much can you learn about the borg by just looking at them in the episodes? If I show you a picture of a Borg implant, could you tell me what it does?

Phlox studied and ultimately defeated the Borg Nanoprobes,

He defeated them through a process of trial and error, not investigation. And it remains to be seen how much he actually learnt about them apart from, "Itty bitty robots."

saw first had the assimilation process

But wasn't able to investigate it all that much.

and was connected with the collective and the hive mind.

Which Seven has stated is white noise. Phlox wouldn't have heard anything useful. All he'd know is that they are connected together. He even thought it was telepathy.

Archer fought Borg drones and saw their adaptive, regenerative personal shields.

That doesn't tell him what the shield frequency was, or anything else useful. Just "They have shields, so you can only shoot them a few times."

Also there was the ships internal security cameras recording the whole thing.

Again, purely visual records don't tell you much about how things work.

They boarded the Borgified ship and saw Borg tech up close.

Doesn't mean they understood what they were seeing. We've seen borg tech up close too, but we still know very little about them.

They fought with the Borgified ship and saw it's Borg weapons, and regenerative hull.

Which as you have said, wasn't a borg ship, but an assimialted cargo ship, so how could they use that to figure out what the Borg were like?

So other than not learning the name of these mysterious "Cybermen" they learned pretty much the same things Picard and his crew learned 200 years later.

Like how Geordi learnt which frequency the Borg were most vulnerable to? And how much of that came from Picard's six days in the Collective, on the Cube?

Probably. But we have seen Starfleet Captains have access to Top Secret intelligence before.

On a need to know basis. What happened prior to Q Who that indicated that Picard needed to know?

Possibly... Except for that omminus warning about them attacking 200 years later.

Actually, T'Pol said it would take 200 years for the message to be recieved. Which is ludicrous anyway, as Picard's Enterprise could have made the trip in 75 years, and is any one really gonna sit there and tell me a starship is faster than subspace radio?

Why not? the Normandy invasion in WWII was one of the most highly classified military operations in World History. Yet between the Hollywood movies, HBO miniseries, History Channel documentaries and High school history classes about it almost every aspect of the invasion is a well known fact. And that was only 67 years ago.

And will they still be making movies about it in another 130 years? And how accurate to reality will those movies be? We can't even make accurate movies about stuff that happened yesterday. it's always dramatised to make it more interesting or exciting.

I'm sure most of the things that we saw Kirk do in TOS and the movies where classified, yet by the 24th Century almost every Starfleet Officer, and Icheb, knew almost everything we knew he did.

Yeah, but all he had to do was put in a DVD to see the actual event. :P

No He was busy. Even Starfleet Intelligence whose job it would have been to investigate, or cover up the Borg, would probably be more focused on the Parasite infestation of Starfleet Command that had just happened prior to the events of "The Neutral Zone".

Right, which supports my point.

All the time, their called Historians, it's kind of what they do.

But Picard's not a historian.

The whole Hansen/Raven thing is another retcon of the Borg I don't feel like bothering with.

Shame.

 

[CaptainJack]

Ha ha, you guys are funny.

 

[Mr Silver]

I don't subscribe to the events of the "Destiny" series of books, nor the proposed origins of the Borg featured in them.

I like to think that the Borg's origins have no connection whatsoever to the Human race. My personal theory is that the Borg came from a distant civilization that began experimenting with collective conciousness. Instead they went too far too soon with the technology and didn't think about refining it, they took one success and tried a monumental experiment which resulted in the Borg. Not an instant change but a gradual one, a collective unit who desired to improve themselves began adding newer members to their collective and outfitting themselves with technology for effeciency.

Eventually this entire civilization is practically gone, replaced with a collective mind who call themselves "The Borg". They then proceed to other civilizations, using their group mind to analyse and assimilate technology and species' from other cultures. By the 14th century they are a "minor nuisance" in the Delta Quadrant, but by the 24th century they are a formidable force and a serious threat to the entire Galaxy.

Perhaps some of this fascination with Earth comes from similarities with their own original culture. Then again I did theorise earlier that the fascination is purely down to the Borg having a form of admiration for Earth (who have prevented their attempts to conquer on numerous occasions) and trying to learn exactly what drives them to resist, something which cannot be learned through assimilation perhaps?

 

[Sci]

I don't subscribe to the events of the "Destiny" series of books, nor the proposed origins of the Borg featured in them.

I like to think that the Borg's origins have no connection whatsoever to the Human race. My personal theory is that the Borg came from a distant civilization that began experimenting with collective conciousness. Instead they went too far too soon with the technology and didn't think about refining it, they took one success and tried a monumental experiment which resulted in the Borg. Not an instant change but a gradual one, a collective unit who desired to improve themselves began adding newer members to their collective and outfitting themselves with technology for effeciency.

Eventually this entire civilization is practically gone, replaced with a collective mind who call themselves "The Borg". They then proceed to other civilizations, using their group mind to analyse and assimilate technology and species' from other cultures. By the 14th century they are a "minor nuisance" in the Delta Quadrant, but by the 24th century they are a formidable force and a serious threat to the entire Galaxy.

Eh, I'm bored. Give me the existentialist horror that Destiny presented as the impetus for the birth of the Collective over another generic "society adopts a new technology and goes too far" parable.

 

[Kelthaz]

Am I the only one who doesn't want to know where the Borg came from? You know, keep a bit of mystery in the universe. I hate it when everything gets wrapped up in a neat little package.

 

[CaptainJack]

I dont really care where the Borg came from either. Im more interested in how they could have remained a Scary Bad Guy while still being able to use them to tell a story. Like Ive said before. I think giving an already Super-Powerful Badguy what amounts to instant beaming tech for ships (transwarp) REALLY limits what you can do with them without having to retcon over and over again.

 

[CaptainJack]

I dont really care where the Borg came from either. Im more interested in how they could have remained a Scary Bad Guy while still being able to use them to tell a story. Like Ive said before. I think giving an already Super-Powerful Badguy what amounts to instant beaming tech for ships (transwarp) REALLY limits what you can do with them without having to retcon over and over again.

 

[Anwar]

Yep, they were too overpowered for more than a couple of stories.

 

[Deks]

'Humans are special' is the most likely argument for why the Borg took such an interest into Earth.
Then again, The Borg tactical strategy of sending 1 ship at a time was doomed to fail from the get go.
Unless that's what they were planning all along.
Keep in mind the possibility that the Borg could have simply been playing theatrics with humans for the most part, even when 7 of 9 was temporarily returned to the Collective, and that their strategy was mostly for inciting technological progress rather than full blown assimilation.
And besides, the Feds at that point in time did not have faster than warp capabilities, and would probably be a year or two after Voyager got back that such technologies would reach wide-spread use.

 

[Courat]

There was an episode planned for season five of Enterprise which would have explained this. Alice Krige, playing a Starfleet medical technician, was going to make contact with 22nd century Borg and end up the Borg queen.

Alternately, read the excellent Destiny novel trilogy, which deals with the beginning and the end of the Borg.

novels mean nothng to the show. they are basically glorified fan fics.

also as far as enterprise goes that sounds like a cheap ploy to explain why logical borg would put so many resources in to an illogical goal. the humans werent trying to kill them so logically they should let bygones be bygones until they conquer the whole galaxy then worry about them.

 

[Mr Silver]

novels mean nothng to the show. they are basically glorified fan fics.

Don't let any of the Trek authors here see that...

 

[Courat]

There was an episode planned for season five of Enterprise which would have explained this. Alice Krige, playing a Starfleet medical technician, was going to make contact with 22nd century Borg and end up the Borg queen.

Alternately, read the excellent Destiny novel trilogy, which deals with the beginning and the end of the Borg.

novels mean nothng to the show. they are basically glorified fan fics.

Don't let any of the Trek authors here see that...

well it is true. They might have written a good book but it is not sanctioned or written by the original writers, so by definition is a fanfic. its not a rip on authors

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

What about Star Trek XI?

Isn't that then, fanfic? Or rather, a fanfilm?

 

[Ghel]

To discuss the separate threads that are being discussed, here is my take.

1. I would believe that the Borg Collective doesn't really care specially about Earth or humanity. Presumably, humans are the first Alpha Quadrant species they've encountered so they throw a ship at us now and again, but have never really put much "weight" behind it. We assume they they haven't attacked any other alpha quadrant races but nothing has been said one way or another. Would a race as duplicitious as the Romulans admit they'd been attacked and lost a significant portion of their fleet . . . doubtful.

2. As far as Picard's reaction, I can see this one being not so much a "need to know" issue as a "too much info, too little time" problem. To compare it to modern day military, as some above have, sure captains may get briefed on all sorts of things, but there is still a limit on how much info you can distribute effectively. In other words, Picard needs to be up to date on most of what is happening with Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, hundreds of member worlds, as well as mission specific information. Even if the Federation knows "vaguely" about the Borg, what is the real probability of there being enough useful information and/or enough time to give Picard a meaninful briefing on the subject. Sure, it may be in the Enterprise database, but for Picard this is like having a UFO land on your front yard, and doing an internet search for "UFO." Four weeks later, after parsing through all of the garbage, you would still be no closer to a real answer of where it is from or what you should do about it.
In addition, we as fans know all of the borg situations are related because we watch the show. It is not necessarily a given that the Federation knows that the cyborgs that were frozen on earth are the same ones that attacked the El Aurians or the same ones that the Hansens were searching for on their trip out. At least in Kirk's era, there seemed to be humanoid robots everywhere.

 

[Tiberius]

That was sanctioned by the studio, so it's not a fan film.

 

[Courat]

@Star Trek movie comment
I'm not talking about the movie. That was a reguritation of Star Trek into a modern form to make money. It has so many continuity errors that I personally do not consider it part of the ST universe. That's just my opinion though.

 

[Kelthaz]

Yep, they were too overpowered for more than a couple of stories.

Given the business reasons I understand why Voyager did what they did to the Borg, but I really do wish they had limited the Borg to one or two episodes per decade. If the Borg had only appeared in say "Q Who", "I, Borg", "Best of Both Worlds", and "Scorpion" everything would make so much more sense. No humanity is special would be required to keep the Federation alive because it would be clear that the Borg barely even notice the Federation.

 

[Anwar]

If "Scorpion" had been the last appearance of the Borg, then they'd still be considered weakened and ruined because we saw them getting beat up by someone; Federation or otherwise.

I'd have just introduced the aliens from "Scorpion" back in Q Who?: Q would teleport the Enterprise into the middle of a battle between them, with the Borg losing. Then when the ENT runs the Borg ship chases them.

It would show them to be powerful, but still beatable and then there'd be no way anyone would get the idea they were Galactic Enemy #1.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

And if Descent had been the last appearance of the Borg, folks would have though that the Collective had been outright destroyed by the events of I, Borg.

I think VOY showing the Borg every now and then was a good thing. Introducing 8472 off the bat would have been foolish, IMHO. The Borg's scope and power would need to be established as to properly (IE, dramatically) hammer home the kind of destruction the 8472 are capable of.

I ca't possibly fathom the issue you have with the Borg being big, powerful and scary, however. Every Nautilus needs a big frakking squid. Space isn't candy and unicorns wrapped in sunshine and flowers.