A lot of Firefly’s appeal is that it seems more “honest” about this as well. The wealth is concentrated on the central planets, and the outlying worlds are mostly shitholes full of struggling people constantly defeated by the broken promises of bureaucracy. So they resort to legal-adjacent means for a lot of things.
Even Deep Space Nine took a more realistic approach to this. As utopian as Starfleet is supposed to be, it is still a military and does mostly military things. DS9 regularly acknowledges this. You can really see the roots of Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot in it. When you send an army to solve every problem, they tend to find solutions involving shooting at stuff.
