In my opinion the Stellaris mod Star Trek New Civilizations is much much better. It actually uses the current version of Stellaris as a base, you can play literally any species in Star Trek, and the mechanics are just great. The game starts in 2150, before the Federation is founded and you (or the AI) actually have to form it as one of the canon founding members, and you can also play as Klingons, Doninion or Borg, all with some unique mechanics. In comparison Star Trek Infinite is not worth it, considering there is a free mod for Stellaris that does almost everything better.

The only thing that has me frozen is Stellaris has so much, and Infinite has 4 factions to pick from. What is the bonus of buying this over just downloading the Star Trek mod for Stellaris? Other than that it looks great, I like the inclusion of popular Star Trek characters, it looks like a reskin of Stellaris which imo is not a bad thing. It looks interesting, but I would have preferred far more faction choices.

One thing I'm very curious about, does the Dominion appear as a Mid or End-game crisis or is it just the Borg? I feel like a lot could be done to make that interesting with the dynamics of the 4 factions, making uneasy alliances and having the weakest of the 4 join the Dominion. Maybe I'm asking too much of this game though.

Well, I played about 20 minutes before work, and so far the difference I've noticed are that autoconstruction doesn't exist and that instead of spacelanes you just have warp right from the start; there was mention of something called "warp highways" but I didn't work it out before I had to go.