Are there any good reasons to not want to be in the Federation?

[Qonfounding Ghooool]

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"?

I kid, I kid...we could and have talked about the moral implications of INS in hundreds of posts in many other threads, and we probably shouldn't derail this one with another go-round.

Oh tut tut, where's the no fun in that? The planet of the Ba'ku wards there was far more than large enough for the Ba'ku, their Son'a* caricature 2D stick figures characters, never mind that the magic radiation stopped working once you left because Geordi - in the next flick - is back to needing optic implants again. Oops. But to be fair, no character in INS had figured that out at the time, other than believing bottling and moving it would be a panacea (as long as nobody trips and slams their hand on the big-bleep self destruct button that every collection truck-in-space has because "cool"), and NEM completely forgot about the plot point and accidentally created a new, amazing... and equally depressing... mindset for anyone who thought INS was the bestest movie ever at the time.

* Yup, that's the spelling. Big giveaway from the get-go, only if they had closed captioning on the theater screen with "SON'A" in big-bleep lettering.

 

[Tenacity]

never mind that the magic radiation stopped working once you left because Geordi - in the next flick - is back to needing optic implants again.

And if the particles had been collected, and a portion had been in the Enterprises sick bay, and every few months Geordi was exposed for a few minutes?

 

[Artoo Atari]

I'm not sure about the Federation, but I would definitely think twice about living on Earth. Space-time anomalies, temporal incursions, manipulations from cosmic entities, threats from hostile species, two alien probes threatening mass extinction within 10 years of each other.... no thanks. I would be packing my bags and catching the first transport to Casperia Prime.