alt Hacker NewsI think they were planned to be capitalists from the first. They came out of the writers wanting a scary alien race to replace the Klingons. It shows how extremist the writers room had become that what they came up with was capitalists. They only scrapped the idea of the Ferengi becoming the new antagonists after screen tests gave them a reality check.
Their second attempt at this created the Borg though, so they did get it very right in the end!
Yeah, they were super capitalists on episode 1.
Honestly, I think the main reason they were hard to sell as the series villains wasn't the capitalist part, it was the fact that they were scrawny and unintimidating. They were just sort of dorky rather than scary. The writers learned well to lean into that dorkiness in later appearances and DS9.
What made the borg intimidating was you actually felt like they were a threat. I mean, pretty early on they captured and converted picard.