One of the most interesting alternate universe / time travel fanfics I've seen for the prequel era is one where Obi-Wan time travels from early into his exile on Tatooine, to around the beginning of the Clone Wars. Since he's aware of the whole, "Emperor Palpatine is Darth Sidious, the Clone Wars were entirely stage managed to get him into power", he decides to that the best way to ruin Sidious' plan is for him to resign from the Jedi Order and then openly join the CIS, with the intent of hijacking it out from under Sidious.
He also goes out of the way to capture as many Clones and Jedi as possible and to treat the prisoners with perfect kindness and adherence to the rules of war, but also gleefully causes a major political crisis by offering to ransom them back for fixed price rates.
I remember that one, it was/is pretty fun. Mind if you provide the link?
I am a sucker for CIS stories.
competent!TradeFed never needs to actually fight the Senate - they're probably better served by just buying it out. Like, the Republic prior to the Clone Wars was a corrupt mess wasn't it? That's not exactly the sort of environment a monopolistic megacorp suffers in. Unless the Trade Fed is a Outer-Rim based megacorp at loggerheads with more politically powerful Core World megacorps.
They were better served working with Naboo than trying to strong arm them. It is good PR, good business, and good morally- if you believe acting in the right manner is good for you. Justice is good for the soul, to paraphrase Plato.
Or just realizes that he's the fall guy and starts trying to win it for real. IIRC Sidious and Dooku had to do a lot more managing to make sure the Separatists didn't steamroll the Republic early on than they did preventing the Republic from doing too well against the Separatists.
That too, but I prefer a Dooku who is redeemed or never fell. But, yeah, the game was stacked hard in favour of the Republic, and the CIS would have roflstomped them.