Neat, the removal of social average human labour in the production of a commodity is the key to removing the commodity form from society and therefore overcoming capitalism

I mean, they had limited casting budget, but also as a piece of art a story needs be driven by the characters and also inform their development as characters. Given those parameters the showrunners had to find a way to force the characters of Riker, Picard, and Data to grapple with the issue. Great episode though