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I miss that variant of goblins that were shown in ROTR and "Wrath of the Fleshwarped Queen," "The Emerald Spire" and many featured prominently in many other adventures. I hope they will make a return sooner than later!The PC Goblins are the exceptions, not the normal.
I figure PC Goblins as outcasts.
Actually if you read Lost Omens Characters Guide the Scarps of Varisia are peculiar in that they've always been treated as vermin by humans, have fought and lost a lot of battles, and the consequence is that they're all very young and that their less evil elders, who kept the wisdom and traditions of their culture, all died in those skirmishes. The humans (and Shalelu, here) don't give them time to grow old and take back their old ways, so they're a culture of teenage delinquents at best.
That said, I confess I think the Scarps are fun. At the same time, I'm having troubles with Pathfinder's characterization of different species (thankfully the word race has been mostly thrown out of the window). It is mostly essentialist: how do ogres behave? How do lamias behave? How do goblins behave? Culture is tied to species/ancestry/"race". Sure, there are variations, but even dwarves and elves fall prey to this mischaracterization. I can almost get behind that because the common ancestries have lots of ethnicities with different cultures, but hobgoblins, for instance, are all a species of efficiency-minded magic-hating ruthless soldiers. I know they were created to be that, but with time they could have become different. More varied, as humans are. As most ancestries could be.
Fantasy has this bad habit of treating different species as monolithic. All lamias are evil. Almost all Avistani orcs are evil. Almost all elves are chaotic good. Humans are the only ones who seem to be molded by their life experiences, as they should, everyone else is seen through an essentialist lens that goes back to Tolkien at the least.
Isn't it time we fought...
We do have evil factions and they have existed from the beginning but to address your initial point: if every race was treated like humans (i.e., anyone can be any alignment), I believe (opinion here) that it would make the game overall more challenging and taxing for people who don't want to deal with "grey" and would rather just have a "point me in the right direction" (perhaps combat heavy over RP heavy individuals). If we treated all drow, orcs, goblins, and ogres as individuals it would bog down several encounters. This makes sense in real life that we should not judge any book by its cover, but for "a game" where the average individual (may) want to just sit and click, er roll, giving them straightforward, no fuss, here's the bad guy/girl because the book says so and their actions back it up, go kill it/them.
Additionally, the game is built predominantly around combat so if you want to "talk through" most (or all of it), which is perfectly fine if all parties are in agreement, then perhaps all world citizens, and non, should receive more skill points per level/race/etc. so that they *could* be more combat and diplomatically ready for future incidents.
Should you go that route, I would suggest expanding and revising (diplomatic) skills as it would be much easier to "solve" situations when you generally only have to worry about a handful of skills. I would imagine that (N)PCs would tend to level up more frequently and the overall median level of creatures in the world would go up.
It sounds like fun.