To address the RSE issue, I would like to see a storyline where Donatra is liberated and then we see what she thinks of the Republic. She wouldn't, I think, be in a position to reconquer it, given the Federation and Klingon Empire's alliance with them, but it would be interesting to see what she would do.
Spend the next year or two in therapy reconstructing her sense of self would be my guess.
The way time passes in STO....the game will be shut down before we see two years pass...I mean it took what...almost half a decade to move to 2410? I don't know if the game will be around in 2025
Actually, iirc we officially moved into 2411 with one of the recent FE
Well I think the RSE is crippled, but it is by far not dead (at least if the storytellers would get him a chance and would not be so biased towards the vulcanized and federalized pseudo-Romulans like D'Tan). The RR rose from not much more than a bunch of refugees, and while it may have swallod a lot of former RSE-Systems, the more it grows the less hard-core it would become. Why? Because I guess just a small group of Romulans is REALLY convinced of all this Re-unification with Vulcan and Spock was a saint and we should create a society like the Fed's BS. They had to include groups who are much more bound to the traditional romulan values. They are socialized in a society which value such things not much (and of course the main concern for most people is just survival, not a concept of "freedom" and re-unification they neveer heard of). And the RR did not always made a good job in keeping people happy. Accodring to the backstories the were problems to feed even the population of Second New Romulos, and of course the planet was besieged and hit more than once hard in the few years it is populated. That is surely not the idealistic lalaland some people want the RR look like. D'Tan had wasted a lot of Romulan blood in wars most Romulans never would want to be part of (for example helping Nelix' useless bunch of whiny victims). I can not imagine Romulans did like to see their relatives killed and their ressources be wasted in wars from which they even benefit less than the imperialistic wars of the RSE...
Take all that together if the story would be written with a little bit more fairness towards the RSE, honesty towards the problems and failures of the RR and an eye for problems to transform a society like the Romulan, the RR should soon become a much more imperialied society, which direction if anything but become a counterpart of the Federation...
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Actually, iirc we officially moved into 2411 with one of the recent FE
Take all that together if the story would be written with a little bit more fairness towards the RSE, honesty towards the problems and failures of the RR and an eye for problems to transform a society like the Romulan, the RR should soon become a much more imperialied society, which direction if anything but become a counterpart of the Federation...