Well, it's not like you can actually have a utopia in as yet developing empire. The most dystopic ends are always going to be pushed out to the edges of the ever expanding borders until there is no where left to expand into. That expansion, the elevation of species and development of their worlds is naturally going to produce haves and have-nots, and that inequality is where dystopic situations will always develop. The government can't be everywhere at once, heck, the corporations can't be everywhere at once, the black void moves with the rushes, they have a super powerful AI that runs their entire organisation and he is ridiculously good at calculating probabilities. These negative niches suck, but wtf can anyone do about them whilst there are still places in the galaxy that they can fill? The core worlds are a lot better off than the border worlds not from lack of caring or sinister planning but basic economics. Even Star Trek, for all its utopian bullshit still has war, disease, exploitation, racism, sexism, slavery, murder, etc. in abundance for the same reason. There's no galaxy-wide empire that has a non-corrupt police force patrolling every nook and cranny nor a benevolent government capable of humanely serving its populace at all times.
Utopia's are ridiculous, they're predicated on absolute control, they're a pipe dream of science fiction, a literary tool to argue philosophy. There never has been nor will there ever be a utopian society. The best you can hope for is the least amount of dystopia in your... Opia.
The government and corporations in TiTS are doing the majority of the opressing? Its outright said that Xenogen likes to scoop up whole alien populations to use as lab rats and sex slaves. This is a fake world with fake economics where everything is under the control of the writers, so actually nothing HAS to be any kind of way at all because it's not real. Are you seriously going to argue that TiTS has to be realistic? In a game with FTL gates, titty lizards and WW1 ant girls? There are no economic pressures in this game creating circumstances. And the game says several times that the core is also full of slavery, Carter runs a massive ring of permenant-indentured-servent brothels as do the Black Void.
I'm pretty sure slavery and sex trafficking are still around in the modern day, so does that mean you consider real life to be dystopian? If you judge everything by its worst aspects, then pretty much every setting not aimed at young kids is crappy. As such, I believe that in order for the term 'dystopia' to have any meaning, there has to be limits on what qualifies a setting as dystopian beyond "the worst aspects are pretty bad"; IMO it's that such aspects must apply to the majority of the population, which is part of my argument above that TiTS as a whole isn't truly dystopian.
The circumstances of how nice life is for the 'haves' are irrelevant because they don't exist in-game, just as lines in the codex. The only stuff we actually see is an endless parade of horror, which can be hard to read about in a sex game