As for the official canon material, I've heard too many SW debaters dig into that and effectively limit what their universe has to deal with to win in a vs. scenario. Specifically: characters supposedly cannot do things uncharacteristic of their storyline personalities. In their own story, in their own universe, that's one thing. Being subjected to a potential loss of their planets, allies, entire way of life, every freedom, all their individual rights, etc... that's totally different. One particular point I submitted (forget where) is that the (True) Borg never joined forces or considered having allies... never EVER. Their absolute unwillingness to negotiate or reason was essentially what made them so fearful. All you could do is try to defeat them, or escape them, but you couldn't even negotiate a surrender. The words 'Resistance is futile' to me was an absolute fact because there is no way to eliminate the threat entirely. That was, until they had their ass handed to them by species 8472 and Voyager convinced them that their defeat was unavoidable without their help. The Borg of course suggested they could simply assimilate Voyager AND the solution to their problem... but in the end, they did something totally uncharacteristic. Now, some might go into a book of official canon and find who knows what to counter this 'observation' but here's how I look at it: I played a game called 'Scruples' once and the question presented to me (basically) was 'if you were in the middle of nowhere and there were no witnesses, would you just drive past a stop sign?' It was voted by the other players that I would, but does this make it true? As far as I'm concerned, the answer is, (or should have been) without a doubt, a definate 'NO' because I generally start driving to a destination with the thought that I'd rather be 1/2 hr-45 min early than 3 minutes late. I should never need to step it up and start breaking laws and I'd have time to pull over and get gas, grab a bite, etc, and I'd have time for a smoke at my destination before proceeding with whatever I need to do there. So what would canon say about it - because the fact is NO but it was voted YES by a majority. And for somebody to try to break down human nature in general to a specific guide or set of rules, much less dictate exact behavioral characteristics for so many characters - to me that's BS. As a writer, a LOT of what goes into a character is often tested, like Troi testing to get command rank. Characteristically, she tried everything she could think of as a solution until it occurred to her that the test was to see if she could step outside of her 'character' and do what needed to be done, even if it meant sending a crew-mate and friend to their death. This might not be the best example of how writers show whether or not a character would be pushed to the limits of their integrity, beliefs, etc, but you get the picture. Anyway I believe characters' behaviors should be left to what we each get from the shows we watch. You believe somebody would do something, I might believe they wouldn't, or might, or agree to theorize that if they did, but having a book dictate to me what we can argue as allowed behavior is rediculous to me. Take 3P0 for example... I can't see this droid picking up a weapon and going to battle. But I can see somebody reprogramming it. Oh, what about Janeway?! Nobody would ever see her becoming religious but there she was, FULLY believing!!! And in the end, the EMH is telling her the scientific explanation, and she was all but in shock that she completely believed, against everything that is characteristically 'JANEWAY' about her. So character behavior - I can accept some. But I won't have it dictated to me for hypothetical scenarios. As a guide for NPCs in a roll playing game, it makes perfect sense to follow it to the letter, but I wouldn't even pretend to respect somebody for quoting it in a SW/ST debate.
As for the Borg and Voyager, they did say in that episode that only the Doctor knew the secret to creating the nano-virus that killed 8472, and protocols were in place to autodelete him if the Borg tried to assimilate the ship. The Borg's weakness, which they presumably recognized, was that lacked ingenuity. The flaw is that if the Borg recognize this as weakness (and the existence of individualistic the Borg "Queen" suggests that they do) then what they should do is create a race of autonomous holographic scientists and doctors, programmed to serve them. The existence of the Voyager Doctor shows that there was a technological solution to their lack of ingenuity, that for some reason they never used.
I don't understand how that which lacks ingenuity could create that which does not, if this is what you're suggesting. But :shrug: who knows where you thought you were going with that idea.
