It's worth it for the awesome court-martialed Enterprise crew and amazing plot. Kind of skim the way too OTT Explanations of Rightness is actually pretty easy, though this story is one of those that could have stood up to much, much better internal debate against the Prime Directive than it got. I'm not sure if the writers just didn't trust themselves to a stronger argument or what, but they could have written a literal seminal Trek novel if they'd been willing to test their beliefs against better arguments.

It's good, you will love it, honestly.