Anna wrote:
Given the length of time Dorian spent working on it without success, teleportation is obviously a tricky problem, and the Federation never manage to produce functional teleport.
Ah, but Dorian was deliberately misdirected by the Seska, because they wanted to build a tele-ergotron in order to steal Scorpio. Also, we don't know how long Dorian had spent working on the teleport (though it was a long time, as Avon scoffed at the idea that Dorian had gone back to basic principles four times). Could the Seska have been "helping" him all along? The episode seems to indicate that it is Pella's personal goal, but perhaps we could argue that it was a goal passed down to her by others.
Since they managed to get tarial cells working decades ago, but not teleport, I'd say that the connection between the Federation and the System could be more along the lines of badly damaged spaceship wreckage, from which the tarial cells and teleport systems were salvaged
The Federation seem to have built an enormous anti-matter minefield in order to protect themselves from the Andromedans on the basis of contact with a single scout ship. Surely if they had come across the wreckage of a System vessel they would also take strong measures? Obviously they would want to boost their technology to match this new threat (which agrees with your theory), but surely they would be trying to locate the source of the threat as well?