You can define “best” and “worst” as you wish.
In my opinion, the Federation and Star Fleet are a beacon of idealism and corruption. Who’re fully willing to let entire peoples die for their prime directive, who’re entirely unable to wrap their heads around the concept of military corruption. These two complaints can’t be found within the Borg Collective, The Borg don’t have hierarchies (even with the “Queen” every drone is equal to the whole of the collective), and thus they are immune to corruption. Their view of the world is strictly dialectical, their galactic quest is void of idealism. Thus, I would say the Borg Collective are the best faction (at least in the TNG era)
For worst, one need look no further than the Romulan Star Empire, Their Imperial government is everything that’s wrong with both the Federation and the Klingon Empire. They’re nothing more than lying, cheating xenophobes with an authority kink. Heck 'em.
I still stan the federation, even tho they sometimes veer into both naive idealism (using the prime directive to not help people as you mentioned), and ruthless pragmatism (section 31). Like section 31 doesn’t bother me, and I’m glad DS9 actually got into that argument regarding espionage / secret police: in the real world every state that wants to preserve itself needs to have these, without them they’d die in a minute. Sloan and Garak are the pragmatists that know how necessary their function is, while Julian was the foil there, trying to see if an idealist route to survive against the dominion was possible.
The Klingons to me have devolved into corrupt nepotism and feudal fiefdoms ran by incompetent rulers, but no one really suffers as the result of that other than themselves… they’ll just slowly fade in importance.
I just watched the origin story for the Borg, and they are more imperialist colonizers than any other faction I can think of: Guinan describes how they destroyed her people, moving from world to world, learning about, then genociding the inhabitants and stealing their tech for the borg’s advantage. Their collective values, unlike the federation, don’t extend beyond their own, and they see others not as someone to coexist with, but to use and destroy, much like the european colonizers saw native peoples in the western hemisphere. They have as much conformity as most euro countries, but they discarded any trappings of culture long ago, and don’t apologize for what they do, which is why they seem so different from colonizers of our time.
The dominion are pretty terrifying in the way they’re structured, like a feudal religious hierarchy like the borgias or something, but with competent manipulators who do genetic fuckery at the top. I’m not sure why tho but they’re less scary to me than the borg, bc the borg has no vulnerabilities in that chain of command, they act like a single computer program where you can only destroy the whole thing, or nothing at all. And they will never stop hunting you. Whereas the dominion you can convince to do cease-fires, temporary alliances, and even convince their Jem Hadar to not fight you.
The vulcans are cool af, and I respect the “communism and friendship is just logical” thing they’re about. And the romulans went the other way with it,
But ya, I still say the federation is my fav, and the borg the worst.
Splitting the difference on the Borg Collective, there’s the voluntary Borg Cooperative from Voyager which doesn’t engage in colonization
The Breen are Juchegang and therefore the best
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