No faction leader is quite as villainous as Sylvanas Windrunner. Even at the height of Garrosh Hellscream's power and megalomania, he drew some philosophical lines on the ethics of being a dictator, though one could argue that his free use of the Heart of Y'shaarj really bent those rules. On the other hand, he clearly was actually in control of the heart's essence, and not the other way around.
Sylvanas seems to lean a lot more in the direction of just-plain-bad. Her use of the Val'kyr to raise the humans her forces had killed in Silverpine and elsewhere drew a damning comparison from Hellscream, asking what difference there was between the Forsaken and the Scourge if they were willing to do that to their enemies. Sylvanas, troublingly, said that the difference was simply that she served the Horde. In other words, she had no problem with the methods of the Scourge, only with their allegiance.
On the other hand, let's suppose that that was just talk - she got a kick out of freaking out the mighty Garrosh Hellscream. After all, it wasn't Sylvanas who ordered the attack on the Wrath Gate, and while she had been developing the Blight that was used there, she may have originally wanted it as a deterrent (though clearly she became more willing to use it in the invasion of Gilneas.) The Forsaken, more than any other racial faction, feels independent from their larger faction. Post Wrath-gate, Thrall sent the Kor'kron to keep a close eyes on the Undercity, but because the Kor'kron turned into Garrosh's secret police and political enforcement agency, it was abolished after he was de-throned, leaving the Forsaken to once again have full control of their territory.
Sylvanas was pushed by Hellscream to take over Gilneas in order to provide a Horde-controlled port in the Eastern Kingdoms (presumably one less out of the way than Quel'thalas or Revantusk Village.) But this turned into a new strategy - to take all of the sub-continent of Lordaeron to serve as a buffer zone.
In the aftermath of Arthas' death, the Scourge is in shambles. As a result, the biggest threat right in the Forsaken's front and back yards became little more than a nuisance. Unsurprisingly, though, a new threat came to fill the vacuum. Humans began to come back and try to settle the Plaguelands, reclaiming the former kingdom of Lordaeron. Given their history, it was never really likely that the humans would happily share their farm space with their more undead former countrymen.
You could blame humans for not treating the Forsaken like the practically human people they are, but Sylvanas' policies haven't exactly done much to reassure people that they're all that different from the Scourge (see above.) So naturally, she expects that a peaceful solution to the Plaguelands is unlikely, and worries - with good reason, I think - that if she allows humans to get a foothold, they will probably try to take back all of Lordaeron.
So, Sylvanas wants to create a buffer zone, keeping the Alliance far away so that the Forsaken can retain their independence and not get wiped out by another Scarlet Crusade. Sylvanas made some rash decisions early on that forever set the tone of the Forsaken's relationship with humanity (not that Garrithos didn't deserve it,) but at this point, her goal of controlling the subcontinent is a sound strategic move, and if we assume that she'd be willing to stop after Arathi Highlands, it downgrades her from super villain status.
But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt - that she's really just trying to establish a buffer to keep her people safe - at best, she's like the Soviet Union taking over Eastern Europe and setting up puppet states.
And meanwhile, one has to wonder just how much control she really has. Varimathras was able to pull off a nearly-successful coup, and while he was defeated, he's a Dread Lord, meaning that he could easily come back at some point. Meanwhile, the Scarlet Crusade is apparently not as dead as we had assumed, and while the Alliance hit a pretty major setback in the battle for Andorhal, it's clear that it's really the Argent Crusade, not the Forsaken, who have control of the Eastern Plaguelands.
Make no mistake, the Banshee Queen is egomaniacal, and does some pretty horrible things. But I'm skeptical that she's necessarily going to become a raid boss as so many people have said she will.
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