One of the greatest things about Star Trek was that the Prime Directive was one of the central ideas of the series...
But most of the time, the point of having it there was to have the characters stand up and break the thing whenever there was the slightest hint of a reason to, as long as the reason was a Kennedy-esque left-wing war-hawk kind of reason such as reversing an injustice that they accidentally participated in or what have you. Every other episode, there was the space equivalent of a Darfur where all the left-wing space pacifists would suddenly do a 180 and be all like "we hate violence... but lets blow up that ship of people accidentally making a group of space frogs extinct... for the frogs!"
Right-wing-style interventionism was so wrong that the Major Rule of the show was forbidding it... but the second that liberal-guilt white-man's-burden interventionism was an option, those motherfuckers just barreled in with laser guns and ion bombs and fucked some shit right up. And I say this as a card carrying bleeding heart everything, it was just such a beautiful microcosm of that kind of ideology.
Y'know... Kirk ain't supposed to fuck no green ladies... but if the green lady WANTS it, hell, who is Kirk to deny her the Siege Tiberius?
So too for this. Some old spaceship crash accidentally left a bunch of shitty rap metal and clown make-up on a planet of fat white trash that didn't know no better and it accidentally created this abomination. Federation is scouting out how to make shit right that once went wrong and hoping that the next leap is the leap home. Gotta just run with that premise and NEVER BREAK CHARACTER.