Criticism of RTS Storytelling

 The UED were introduced via retcon in BW, and were not originally planned as part of the franchise. The BW website at the time of release made no mention of the UED, but only stated that "Terran Emperor Mengsk I...must now turn his attention to...a conspiracy deep within his own ranks."  In order to explain why the UED wasn't mentioned in the SC1 manual or OG campaigns, the BW manual states that  the UPL secretly spied on Koprulu for centuries and then reformed as the UED when they saw the protoss and zerg ravage Koprulu. There are several problems with this retcon. How did the UPL secretly spy on Koprulu for centuries and without being discovered? In order for this to work, they would need human agents to infiltrate the colonies and remain both loyal and undetected over multiple generations. This is simply unbelievable, but it gets even more unbelievable from there. The UPL decided not only to secretly spy on Koprulu, but to keep Earth's and Koprulu's existence...

 The UED campaign relies on DuGalle and Stukov making inconsistent idiotic nonsensical decisions, otherwise Duran's plan would have failed much earlier. When DuGalle and Duran meet for the first time, DuGalle admonishes him as an untrustworthy traitor. In every subsequent conversation DuGalle hangs on to Duran's every word and always takes his advice against that of DuGalle's childhood friend Stukov. When Stukov suggests keeping the psi disruptor around as an anti-zerg weapon, Durans counters and says that would interfere with their plan to enslave the zerg and so it must be destroyed. DuGalle trusts Duran over Stukov, despite stating earlier he holds only contempt for the former and the latter being his childhood friend who is obviously completely trustworthy.  Stukov's plan obviously makes much more sense: in the event that anything goes wrong with the plan (which is especially likely since it's a completely untested plan and the zerg are already known to evolve...