There is no doubt that for its entire existence, the Achaemenid empire was not merely the greatest and most advanced, efficient, and prosperous empire in the world, it was the greatest and most advanced, efficient and prosperous empire that had ever existed. Its significance in this regard is readily comparable to that of the Roman Empire in Europe or the Qin-Han Empire in China. The complete lopsidedness of power of the empire and the known world means that only comparisons to the Mongol or British Empires at their heights really do it justice.

That said, it is important not to go overboard in our assessment of it, especially in terms of modern norms. It could certainly be argued that the problem is that we have romanticized Greece too much - not that we need to romanticize Persia more!

It is correct that our limited sources from Persepolis and thereabout do suggest that women could hold positions of significant status at least in Persia proper - the one that always comes to my mind is heading large labour teams. It is however not true that slavery was banned (this is a persistent myth of unclear origin) - while the empire at large was certainly not a "slave economy" the way Greece was, and wage labour appears to have been the norm, there is ample documentation of the trade of slaves and the use of forced labour in many parts of the empire and a long tradition of large-scale slavery in Mesopotamia (which, though, had also declined during the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, immediate predecessors to the Achaemenids).

The notion of "religious freedom" is misplaced here and is based on an unfortunate conflation of certain declarations in the obscure language of the Cyrus Cylinder (related to Cyrus' symbolic restoration of Babylon) and the particular experience of the Judaean population. During Assyrian and Babylonian dominion, the population of Judaea was subject to population transfer and various other means of imperial control. While often very brutal, it's important to understand that this is a standard method of imperial management from the earliest territorial empires into the modern era. With ancient population sizes, it was especially viable to take a large portion of a "troublesome" population and simply force them to move somewhere else, where they would be less able to stir up trouble.

This, as well as the destruction of religious buildings and idols, is a method that the Achaemenids used as well as their predecessors, known for example from the XPh inscription and Xerxes' sacking of Athens. What the Biblical attestations really reflect is not some highly anachronistic policy of religious freedom (the popularity of the idea that it did might be to some extent the result of modern nationalist mythmaking), but rather simply a friendlier relationship with the Judaean elites. The Achaemenids (apparently going back to Cyrus who, technically, was not an Achaemenid, that line begins only with Dareios) appear to have struck up a friendly relationship with the Judaean priesthood, taking sides in a power struggle with the Davidic line of kings.

In the end, the question of whether Western society would be better off had it come under Persian dominion, however, reflects an overestimation of the influence ancient empires had on their peripheral populations. Even ignoring the immense geographic difficulties of keeping Greece under control, large empires of the past were able to become so large because they tried to leave local power structures in their place to as large an extent as possible, while extracting tribute and taxes. Thus it is hard for me to think that Greece itself would really have been all that radically different - and in any case, Greece was certainly not less "concerned with warfare" than the Achaemenids were.