Comment by jerf

Read https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusD... . My point is Doylian; arguing about the Watsonian perspective is not a relevant rebuttal.

I would also observe that even from a Watsonian perspective that the idea that the Federation isn't exactly the utopia it is presented as is fairly easy to substantiate. For a society with "no disease" there sure are an awful lot of people with diseases. For a society that supposedly means that they have replicators and anyone can have what they want, the citizens read to me as extremely impoverished relative to that level of technology on the screen. They aren't deciding they want to head off to Risa for a vacation and just replicating themselves starships to get there. In fact Federation citizens seem to live in quite astonishing scarcity most of the time.

It makes sense from the Doylian perspective, though. The show isn't about the normal citizen and it would be very distracting to a 20th/21st century audience for them to be actually fabulously wealthy by any modern standard.