Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Romulans

For the longest time unpublished, Michael Piller's work Fade In: From Idea to Final Draft — The Writing of Star Trek: Insurrection lays out the Insurrection scriptwriter's initial treatments for the film, the second of which opens on a "small Romulan vessel" (in the Briar Patch), pursued and then destroyed… by Data. The rest of the plot still relies on the 'insurrection' element, but in this case, Picard must rebel when he discovers that Starfleet and the Federation have teamed up with the Romulans to relocate thousands of physiologically vulnerable telepathic aliens away from their planet in order to gain access to a much-needed ore used in practically all medical technology across the galaxy.

Unfortunately, Patrick Stewart, also associate producer on the film, hated the idea, and especially, it seems, all the bits with the Romulans. In Fade In, Piller included what was, according to him, a letter sent by Stewart to Rick Berman, dated 1st July 1997. In the letter, Stewart enumerated his criticisms of Piller's story idea bullet point style, concluding:

I think what dismays me most about the story is the dredging up of the Romulans — a race already unexciting in TNG — as the bad guys. It is revisionist and backward looking in a most disappointing way. After the Borg — the Romulans? Oh, my.

In the end, Piller and Berman returned to the fountain of youth idea they didn't think they could sell to Stewart in the first place, and he loved it. Sadly, the Romulans (and the telepathic aliens) were out; the Son'a and the Ba'ku were in.