A similar question was recently asked (with no replies) but surprisingly this topic hasn't really come up much on the board (that I could see.)
So with a recent POD- say no earlier than 2005- what's the best possible outcome for the Arab Spring?
We're dealing with a set of unique circumstances in each country, so I'm sure people can come up with varied answers. Feel free to limit yourselves to the best possible outcome for an individual nation, or to tackle it as an over-arching phenomenon.
There really isn't a single POD for this that would lead to positive outcomes in all the countries involved. (Bahrain? Syria? Yemen?)
With Egypt, there are several PODs that could have ended up better. The best scenario would have been if events in January and February 2011 went a little differently, and you got some civilian-led phased transition. This could have happened had Mubarak ceded his powers to Omar Suleiman and had the opposition been willing to negotiate. Suleiman himself was not a democrat by any means, but in hindsight, empowering the military wound up being the worst of both worlds. An agreement with the civilian authorities might have been preferable. That could have led to a consensus interim president being elected, and more rapid elections to a constituent assembly before the revolutionary coalition of leftist activists and the Islamists broke down.
Otherwise, things may have turned out okayish even if Morsi hadn't been elected - if Hamdeen Sabahi and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh had agreed to run a joint campaign as originally planned they would likely have beaten either Morsi or Ahmed Shafiq (the old regime candidate). The military would still have been powerful, but you might have prevented the full-scale return to autocracy you got as a result of Morsi alienating everyone and leading to a coup. Alternately, if Morsi had avoided his November 2012 constitutional coup (itself prompted partly by prestige from his conduct during that fall's Israel-Gaza war). The military initially looked willing to tolerate Morsi, as did many activists. But that process alienated virtually everyone, and the resulting chaos and polarization helped drive the conditions that led to the coup.
In none of these cases would Egypt have been a model democracy. But experience shows even imperfect, military-heavy transitioning democracies can become real democracies over time if civilian politics is given a real space. The coup cut that process short.
For Libya, best case would have been if Gaddhafi had fallen right away, when protests initially swept Tripoli in late February 2011. That would have avoided the militarization of the conflict. Otherwise, had the US and EU been willing to send a peacekeeping force to major cities and if there had been a NATO or UN envoy overseeing the process, à la Bosnia and Kosovo.
For Syria, best case scenario is that the army instigates a coup against Assad within the first months of the conflict and implements a transition to a more democratic system (though it'd likely still be well short of a full-on democracy).
Not knowledgeable enough about Yemen to know what the options were there. And in Bahrain, I'm not sure what could have convinced Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states to allow political reform.