Just because you see an apparently abandoned house doesn't mean you can move into it.
Say you did though, and then say you managed to live there for hundreds of years without causing any damage, bothering anyone or anybody trying to evict you. You'd have a pretty good case to say that's your house now.
Insurrection has beloved characters but they show themselves to be shallow. Shouldn't they be worried about their futures, Riker about ever being a captain, Beverley about seeing her son again.
Wouldn't being worried about their careers actually show them to be shallow? What they instead do is put everything at risk to stick with their captain and do what they believe to be right, which is exactly what we as the audience would expect them to do. Imagine the threads on here if Riker had gone "Gee, Jean-Luc, I really would like to help you stand up to corruption in the ranks and protect all those people, but I really really want to be a captain someday and this wouldn't look good on my résumé".
I know it wasn't just the Baku it was the principle for Picard but even that was muddied. Let 500 live forever and deny the benefits for millions..
But it's not the Federation's right to make that decision. Nor Admiral Dougherty's, nor Ru'afo's. Imagine going into a foreign country, finding a valuable natural resource and then forcibly removing the local population in order to mine said resource. That's the kind of shit that went on in British Colonial times.
On another note, I'm curious how exactly the Federation can claim the planet as their own ("we have the planet") when there is already a non-federation population living on it. There must be dozens of unaligned peoples within Federation space (some pre-warp, others definitely warp capable) and such a claim isn't presumably made about those planets.
I actually don't take the "we have the planet" line to mean it's expressly a Federation-owned/claimed planet, more to mean that it's located within Federation-controlled space, and the Son'a can't physically access the planet without the Federation's consent.
There was a missed opportunity in this film to make the pretty aliens, who look more like humans, the villains. Nothing would be more exciting if Picard went all out of his way to defend these villagers to later discover they including his new girlfriend were sinister.
That would actually have been quite cool. Kind of like when the Voyager crew helped the Vaadwaur (not necessarily pretty, but apparently sympathetic), only to find out they were epic bad guys of old.
