Oh but if I went 'round sayin' I was Emperor, just because some mechanistic bint lobbed a phaser at me, they'd put me away.

This is one of my greatest disappointments on all of Star Trek. Why did they have to make a leader for the Borg? And turn them into a cult that hunts down non-believers?
- I agree completely. A collective run by everyone’s brain being cybernetically networked was an interesting, unique idea. A culture run by an amoral dictator is boring and painfully unoriginal.
  
  This is what actually made the Borg terrifying.
  There was nobody to talk to or negotiate with. There was no mind to change. There wasn't even a leader to assassinate in hopes to alter policy.
  They were less of an enemy and more of an immutable force, like gravity or magnetism.
- She wasn't too bad in First Contact. The movie implied that she was simply an avatar for the Collective, not too different from Locutus. Later writers didn't get that and VOY turned her into an individual within the Collective who controlled all of it, somehow. Then her depiction just kept getting further and further from her depiction in First Contact, mostly keeping superficial things.
  Section 31 went through a very similar shift, where DS9 implies that Sloan and S31 are rogue agents and Sloan is talking out of his ass in regards to any real authority and taking an, at best, extremely liberal interpretation of the Starfleet Charter, then later works making them an official part of Starfleet.
  
  The movie implied that she was simply an avatar for the Collective
  She says that. And then she dies and the Borg are defeated.
  On the other hand, on VOY, she says the same, and then proceeds to create a Fascist organization clearly against the goals of the drones. But at least when she dies, the Collective creates a new queen.
  About Section 31, my understanding is that it was once official. And then it was disbanded with prejudice, but the high powers don't really want it gone, so S31 has authority even on DS9 and LWD times.
  
  Section 31. I’m one of those few people who actually wants more S31 stuff, but only if it’s done correctly.
  Way too many followups treat it like Starfleet’s CIA (Starfleet Intelligence already exists…) instead of a conspiracy that consists of individuals acting out of various degrees of ideological resolve, and to varying amounts. I imagine most people who are “in” S31 are more like Bashir. They are called upon to look the other way, or do something without being told much about it. Otherwise they have day jobs. I’m sure various Starfleet command level officers are in on some aspect of S31, but that doesn’t make their ships full time S31 ships. Only a very few people further the S31 cause full time, and they are totally off the books. S31 is supposed to be a shady group that parasitically uses Starfleet assets.
  I idea of Section 31 black badges is so preposterously mind blowing.
- If they don't have a queen then how is the captain going to have a romantic interest?
  
  Polyamory?
  
  The beast with a billion backs!
  
  Hum... Are you talking about Janeway here? Because in TNG her crush is on Data.
- Isn't it canon that reintegrating Hugh caused individuality to spread through the Collective, which could only be solved by creating one individual to control them?
  
  Nope, but that would have been a much better take.
  In First Contact, Picard has flashbacks and mentions that the Queen was there the entire time while he was Locutus. Gross retcon.
  Hugh and the individual Borg led by Lore were just a small subset, maybe a single cube. I can't remember if that was stated directly in Descent or not, but it was implied to be a relatively small group affected.
  
  I like this theory until Picard says he remembers the Queen in First Contact.

You’re fooling yourself! We’re living in a dictatorship! A self perpetuating autocracy in which the working class Borg-
- There you go, bringing Galaxy class into it again...
- Oh, what a giveaway! Did'j'hear that, did'j'hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about! Did you see 'er repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?!

The borg queen was a weak spineless idea!
- The concept of a Borg queen basically destroys the entire concept of the Borg for me.
  They were supposed to be a hive mind, but with a queen they're just slaves and the Borg are no more interesting than the Mongol empire.
  The queen is a single point of failure, her existence as an individual weakens the hive and makes it less elegant/perfect (a single distributed individual consciousness is such a cool idea).
  Plus the queen was an idiot, getting constantly outwitted by ploys they should have been anticipated 10000x over with a trillion minds working at once.
  
  i was genuinely confused when i learned about the borg queen, it makes no fucking sense on any level and feels like something that was edited in post
  
  I agree with your take.
  I was never a Trekkie, but my gf has been since she was a kid, so she's been sharing the setting with me.
  I really, really liked the borg threat, but the Queen cheapens it for me significantly. Not so much that she exists, but that she's literally the Nexus of the whole thing.
  My suspicion/prediction was that the borg would be undone by some sort of biotechnical exploit, likely either some sort of "virus" that would be assimilated and spread through the system, nullifying/destroying them or their abilities...or some kind of trojan horse, similar to the virus but something that would take federation and romulan cooperation to build something that was very desirable to the collective but with a built in vulnerability that would leave them open to a specific attack (maybe something like capturing a Borg and altering them in a way that used the Borg "learning" against them, by countering the advantages of things they assimilate and then learning at the same pace as the Borg, but in learning how to halt their progress)...or maybe some sort of star trek version of a DDOS where they were able to somehow overwhelm the Borg with things to assimilate, but that were "dumb machinery"...with a huge glut of these assimilations of mundane subjects, maybe it'd have the effect of reducing the average of the collective, making it more beatable. Basically adding lots of dead weight to "bring down the curve".
  Or, of course, there was always the possibility of time warp or Q related nonsense, but IMHO that would have been even worse than what we got with the Queen. As popular as Q is, I never liked that addition to the setting.
  
  The queen is a single point of failure
  This is actually not true. The Borg have multiple queens
- Ironically, the Borg Queen is mostly spine.
- The idea wasn't spineless, it just was an idea that lacked any legs. Couldn't really gain any traction with viewers.
- Not sure if great joke or legit criticism. Por que no los dos.

Apparently originally it was supposed to be a computer? I think the studio said that was just stupid and it needed to be a person?
- Even that turns it into a beehive instead of an autonomous collective.
- A Macintosh Quadra some designer brought from home.
  
  Wow… a Quadra. I remember wanting one of those!

I don't know which I hated more. Hugh or the Borg Queen. Probably the Borg Queen because they kept going with that stupid idea.
- hugh is at least not offensive to the whole idea of the borg

I do like the fan theory, although the official canon disproves it but still, that the Borg Queen (or perhaps just her more individualistic nature) was actually a reaction to humanity being such a pain in the ass.