It's not just about the board being ineffective. It's about Phineas being ineffective too.
Quite literally (prior to the events of OW1) Phineas and the board couldn't figure it out working together. The actual first questline of the game is dealing with people so stupid the shocking reveal of a diet consisting of ground up sticks and rocks with a little bit of rocksalt and tuna in it will make people sick and isn't food.
The villains and world are written so badly it actually destroys the game just by virtue of there being easily accessible interstellar space travel but the population literally is eating rocks and dirt. Literally the Board having the idea of just going and putting all of those people down like dogs feels like a mercy for them, which almost certainly wasn't the intention as written.
The food isn't literal ground and sticks, it's just that one plant uses rats/sprats as "tuna" since it turns out there isn't any actual fish on the land they settled, so they lie to their customers what's in the cans(it's Spacer's Choice, go figure). The rest of the food in the solar system is indeed real food but it has zero value because the slop it is made from cannot be digested for nutrients like real food by people, and so they eat more and more and are still hungry. That's why the main priority for Board scientists is the diet toothpaste, as stupid as it sounds, so that workers don't notice the difference and slowly, quietly starve to death without starting food riots. Spacer's Choice didn't get the memo and are just incompetent retards that cut too many corners with their failing colony, in fact one of the end game Board quests has you going back there and exterminate it for costing the colony too much money.
After all that, you can hardly see the board as anything more then a group of moustache-twirling, saturday morning cartoon villains, who are literally yucking it out in one of the video recordings you find in the Board HQ, how everyone will work their lifes for them till the end of time.
Phineas wanted to defrost passengers from Hope both as something morally and ethically just, as well as a form of fullfilling his ambition and sticking it up to the Board. It wasn't just about defreezing scientists and engineers from Hope to help with Halcyon's food problem, it was about defeating the Board and re-establishing communication with Earth, to bring back order, that would prioritize the survival of the colonist (it pisses me off, that even if you will complete two quests, that ties directly to the Halcyon's food shortages - Adelaide McDevitt way of "enriching" the soil and Eva Chartrand research on DNA recombination - they are not mentioned as contributing to the food problem in any meaningfull way in the Endgame commentary)
Bottom line: Cain's comments come off as incredibly duplitious, omitting key story parts in order to push his own narrative. Wouldn't expect less from an old, agenda driven faggot.
This could be solved so easily too, just have a third route where you get to become the head of The Board. be it politically or by taking it over violently, and become a dictator that makes their own choices on how to settle the affairs, Yes Man style since the game takes so much inspiration from New Vegas. You could have the middle ground where the colony is still a dystopian shithole but you don't kill the Hope colonists and actually solve the food crisis, something you cannot do if you side with The Board in the final game. As you said, the state the game shipped in Board are just mustache twirling villains and there is zero reason to ever side with them unless you're roleplaying as an evil bastard yourself, that same kind of character that would go out of their way to nuke Megaton or overrun Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3 with feral ghouls for shits and giggles, except it's a main story questline. Everyone else will side with Phineas because there is simply no reason not to. I can't really defend Tim or whoever wrote this mess, all I can say is that with everything I've seen about the game in it's early form, this was probably not planned and likely either result of lack of time/budget to create more or it was that late game redditization I was talking about("Capitalism is bad, so we need to make the capitalist faction extra evil and mean!").
The Board are bafflingly incompetent, yet are at the Apex of power and control, it doensn't jive, they'd be swiftly ousted and killed by any military oriented guy with ambition, as has been the case for eons, you simply cannot believe they are still in power, because it doesn't gel with all historical or even fictional villain's.
The only reason Board is still in power is because the people of Halcyon are either the biggest, most docile brainwashed nigger cattle imaginable, to the point that you might as well be an isekai protagonist in some exotic manga where nobody is normal, or they're drugged up raiders terrorizing the colony. There will be no organization to overthrow them on any large scale, they got spacers/mercs in their pockets(there is a questline dedicated to proving this point), Groundbreaker is the only independent station in the solar system and they are actively being broken by their own independence, player has to go out of their way to make sure Groundbreaker stays independent. Aside from Phineas, who is just one man with a pet protagonist, you have Monarch, where the two main factions(three if you count SubLight) could stand to be a solid opposition if they united, but won't because they aren't getting along and will, once again, fall apart if you don't intervene. The Board aren't good villains, but they are really lucky that their opposition is too divided or spineless/stupid to do anything about them. That's why you and the other Hope colonists are such a big deal, they haven't drunk the kool aid and it is assumed that if woken up, they will try and fight The Board just as the player does, which would no doubt lead to their collapse as the colonists are the most competent people still left in the solar system.
Anyways, if you want to argue that this is not realistic or whatever, I point you to what's going on in Europe, specifically UK, Germany, France and Sweden. Niggercattle does exist, and yes they will roll over at the first sign of a fight even when it makes no logical sense, even if their government are indeed weak and incompetent crackpot dictatorships hiding under the veneer of civilized democracy. Say what you want about the game and it's writing or story, but this aspect where everything decays and falls apart due to ordinary people being spineless and people in charge being clueless and both parties being absolutely retarded ages like fine wine with every passing year. It felt on the nose in 2019, but now? Almost feels like that social commentary the game desperately wanted to be, just not the in the way Obsidian intended.
all the "great" western video game writers turned out to be lame, gay or REALLY faggy, like Josh Sawyer, who can't even give his target audience what they want, CRPG smut romances, and in fact goes out of his way to deny them.
I've said it before, but even the incredibly hammy at times, Xenoblade 3 is leagues, AEONS, fucking GALAXIES higher in quality of writing and dialogue than the best of the current CRPG and other WRPG writers shit, I don't know why the medium Nip writers are so much better than the current western crop, but it simply "Do be like that".
The only western writer that has consistently done good work is Chris Avellone. Aside from him, I mostly wrote off western games all together. Japs suck at making RPGs, at least traditional ones, so slavs are the only ones who can be expected to write something interesting these days.
Tim has bitched about modern Obsidian, but he's still happy to take their money.
So make of it what you will.
I'm pretty sure he's checked out of games all together at this point, the only thing he has going is Outer Worlds since he sees it as his baby. Not really his fault that Obsidian is, well, Obsidian. Should have reached out to InXile instead if he wanted it to be a competent product, Wasteland 2 and 3 slap so they clearly still have the chops to make good RPGs.
