Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

A woman creates an "ideal community" by staging an unethical experiment on a group of people which results in the death of seventeen of the people involved.

But at the end of this experiment -- ten years later -- the people involved decide they want to keep the experiment going because they are happy with how it turned out, and think the woman is actually their saviour.

What kind of message does this send to the audience? Or are we supposed to make up our own mind as to whether she is the hero, villain or just an average person of the piece?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708574/?ref_=ttep_ep15