cloak and actually made it better than the Rommie's off the shelf cloak?
SF engineers can do most anything and yes, once the Romulans got wind of it they'd be pissed.
But dealing w/the Dominion is a whole different ballgame, and besides the Dominion's anti proton sweeps pretty much thru the Defiant's wal-mart cloak.
Besides, it would have made The Search even better w/a little S31 controversy involved.
Thoughts?
They didn't have to re-develop it because they got the cloak from the ship and was back in Federation hands..... the thing is that they didn't distribute this device because of their existing treaty with the Romulans to not use such devices and only allowed one Federation ship to have a cloak.... their cloak, to gather information in the Gamma quadrant against the Dominion.... it was not to be used in the Alpha quadrant (which seemed to be forgotten about at times)
The Romulans preferred them to use their own cloaking technology because then they knew which ship had it, how many had it and it's capabilities...... meanwhile if they used the other cloak, besides breaking the agreement, the Federation wouldn't have to give any information to the Romulans, wouldn't have to tell them how many ships had them, nor would they have to tell them about the capabilities in full about the device.
It would have been a good device to have on their ships.... but it wasn't going to happen without some kissing of some Romulan arse and a lot of compromise.... or face a war with the Romulans.
Then again, if they used this device, they probably wouldn't have needed to get the Romulans on their side in the first place and could have taken on the Dominion a lot better.
Though the problem with that is that they still can not fire while cloaked, thus once they uncloaked, they're still the same ships that were getting their butts kicked and eventually as mentioned through the DS9 series, the Romulans were swaying towards siding with the Dominion near the end (before Sisko & Garak dragged them into the mess) and then the federation would have had not just the Dominion researching how to defeat the new cloak, but the Dominion would have had Romulan expertise helping them figure it out.... thus eventually the device would have been rendered useless.
Afterall, once they found the "Frequency" the devices operated on (via a founder), they'd be able to adjust their sensors and weapons to locate out-of-phase ships and have their weapons fire in the right phase to hit the starships out of phase, who also have their shields down and would be sitting ducks.
Due to the approach made in the series, the Romulans ended up on the Federation's side, thus the Dominion have limited resources in researching cloaking technology. They made the right choice in sticking with just the one cloak and not giving the finger to the Romulans and their agreement.