… or why didn’t some psychopathic Admiral decide to take the technology and crew an entire rogue starship with nothing by cloned Picards or a dozen ships all crewed by duplicated Datas or an army of cloned Worfs

If the transporter system is capable of disassembling someone or something at the molecular level … doesn’t that mean it would be capable of making a copy? There have been plenty of episodes where there were ‘accidents’ and duplicates were created. So it means that the system is capable of being programmed to make multiple copies if they wanted to.

And if that were the case, someone somewhere would have weaponized this technology. It’s like the period when we all discovered digital music and duplication software and hardware became available, all of sudden we could duplicate any digital media we wanted and it went wild for a while. I’m pretty sure out of the billions of people and species that would have had access to this technology, one of them or a few of them would have put two and two together and figured out that it could create clones and duplicates. It would turn into a great weapon for someone with a maniacal plan.