^ There is only one Dune and Frank Herbert is it's author!
I really think the only way to get the feel of Dune is to have the PC's be nobles fighting for their piece, but this is sort of anti-Traveller where most PC's are commoners trying to just get by.
The freedom of snaking your way across a sector is entirely eliminated by the advent of the Guild, that controls all space travel.
Commoners are little more than minions, even when they're in the immediate employ of a great house. Not much freedom there.
Again, I find it hard to shoe horn one universe into the other.
Well, in Traveller most of the highest nobles probably would think of individual commoners as less then a chess piece unless they were Old Family Retainers or some such. Not necessarily a matter of callousness but simply a matter of how much information about other people's lives a given person could process.
Commoners in Dune often acted on their own. The Fremen certainly did.
The Guild's did have a monopoly over intersteller travel. However what about the smugglers? Did they have some way of defying the monopoly? Or were they just an on-planet phenomenon at Arrakis? I couldn't figure that one out.
It is perfectly possible to have the PC's be nobles fighting for their piece, all the while knowing that commoners were fighting for theirs.