I'll say again what I've said many times: the Zuma are a vacuum for every event in the area. No matter what we do, no matter how we go about it, everything always ends up with the Zuma. It seems increasingly impossible to have anything happen that is independent of the Zuma. I'm not sure why Tom believes this is fun, but presumably he does.
Replace "the Zuma" with "Terran" or "Kabrinskia", and you'll probably find that it's the same.
They're a power in that area. Trying to pretend they don't exist, or expecting that they'll pretend you don't exist, seems to me to be pretty unrealistic.
Think of them as another realm, and a
lot of your complaints about them suddenly sound really absurd.
