@player8472 The Prime Directive applies to civilizations that have not yet made first contact with alien species, it only coincides with warp technology because Cochran's warp flight is how Earthlings found out about the Vulcans. But you are right, it is broken as often as it is enforced. It should be called The Prime Suggestion.
@maeron What i mean is, how can kirk supply "snakes to eden" a few years later and here they enforce the prime directive on their own civilization.
And no, it not "just coincides"!
The Line is literaly pre-warp/warp-cultures.
The federation took the vulcan rule and implemented it.
T'Pol mentioned how vulcans do it and why numerous times in ENT and Picard spoke about the prime directive applying because xyz is a pre-warp culture multiple times.
On the other hand they (as i mentioned in my original comment) helped pre-warp-settlers from time to time (The irish dude who wanted Riker to mary his daughter (who was the real head of the household) in a TNG Episode come to mind).
So the golden rule seemed to be, that it was dependend on the culture, not if the people had been on their homeworld at the time.
Remembering correctly, they even had talks about helping a pre-warp culture that hadn't archieved warp-travel yet, BUT already met other warp-cultures.
The rules about that always seemed a bit fuzzy(Contact no problem, helping being a bit tricky...)
Shout by Marc FriedolinVIP 6BlockedParentSpoilers2019-01-25T08:00:44Z
Kind of funny, that people abducted very short before humanities first contact fall under Directive One, while the pre-warp-settlers picard relocated do not.
I guess the prime directive only applies when it's convenient for the writers, or only when the peoples ancestors left on their own?
I made that connection from memory. I don't get how the writers who literally do have staff, that watches through the material continues to fail seeing such inconsistencies.
Well, maybe they do and choose to ignore it.