What bothers me is the Concept of a Queen, that rules the hive and the changing of the Borg from just interested in technology to assimilating everyone.
But try to think of it like a writer. How many stories can you tell about a foe that's only interested in technology and not people? Stories are about characters. There have to be personal stakes. Sure, sometimes the stakes are "Our ship will be blown up and we'll all die," but if
every story is so impersonal, it gets boring.
The idea of the Borg being interested only in technology and not in people was abandoned after one episode. And that's because it
didn't work. Not dramatically, anyway. There had to be personal stakes in order to sustain the concept.
Let's look at a similar case:
Stargate SG-1 did a number of effective episodes about the
Replicators, which were self-replicating robots that existed only to seek out advanced technology and incorporate it into new Replicators. That was pretty impersonal, and pretty much like the original concept of the Borg. The Replicators made an impressive debut in a 2-parter, then came back pretty much unchanged in a second story -- although in that story, they were one of two featured enemies. In their third story, they gained a "Queen" of sorts -- an android who turned out to be their creator. And they "evolved" into a humanoid form played by actors from their fourth appearance onward.
Now, the Replicators had some distinct advantages over the Borg. Rather than slow-moving stuntmen in clunky costumes, they were skittering CGI bugs that could take on a variety of visually interesting forms and be quite effectively scary. They were basically the same concept as the "Q Who" Borg, but with much better design and execution. But even they got only one appearance in their pure, original form before the writers started adding more personalizing elements to their comeback stories -- pitting them against more humanoid villains in their second story, giving them an android creator in the third, then finally humanizing the Replicators themselves. Now, personally, I didn't care for the human-form Replicators at all. But I can understand the reasons for introducing them, both dramatic and budgetary.
The original borg were a mysterious really alien race that were dumbed down to a mainstream baddy.
Think about that word, though: "mysterious." It means that you don't know much about something. But if you bring something back in multiple episodes, it's inevitable that you'll learn more about it each time. Especially when your heroes are Starfleet officers, people trained in exploration, discovery, and problem-solving and who will thus respond to any new threat by learning all they can about it. So anything in fiction, and especially in Trek, is going to be more mysterious in its first appearance than in its tenth. If you want something to stay mysterious forever, pretty much the only way to do that is to avoid reusing it altogether.
As for the Queen, I've always seen her as an embodiment of the Collective (a sort of 'hub') rather than their actual leader. She appears to be the one in charge because she is the focus for information, which is sorted, analysed, assessed for probability and success rates, before action is taken. But like I said, that's just how I see her role.
That's how I've always seen it. She's like the frontal lobe (IIRC) of the human brain, the part that coordinates the activity of the rest of the brain and gives it a sense of volition and focus. The Borg Collective has always been a single individual mind; the Queen is simply a dramatic contrivance for giving it a face and a voice.
