If we're necro-ing this, lets do it all the way.
My idea of goblins is that knitty gritty feel of absolute chaos that somehow works out. Basically, there is no labor specialization (except for maybe an elite noble caste that has some other important role) and every goblin does both industry and war.
My take on the big controversies:
Food is the most major controversy I see, so we'll do that first. I don't think goblins shouldn't eat food, and should instead have quite a few things that make them harder to manage than a race that does eat. Food is rather easy to come by in the case of dwarves and humans, so I don't see it being a huge problem removing the need to eat.
As for tech, I think they should keep their no-alloy philosophy, though perhaps a crude form of adamantine working (very limited to what they can make, and quality will always be low) could be introduced as their endgame material, what with it being connected with demons? To continue the no-alloys thing, they could use the metals that are mainly used in alloys as their own metal, like using tin, lead, and zinc as weapons-grade metals. They should also focus on making crap gear: there simply shouldn't be any other alternative to at best standard efficiency workshops that produce low quality gear.
They should also have something that lets them easily procreate: either a more kobold-esque rapid breeding workshop, a fast grow speed and large litters of traditional babies (maybe not since relationships are broke), or just some way to summon peasant hordes from the dark fortress that is the center of any goblin civ.
Another thing I think would be thematically cool is if you were somehow rewarded for embarking in evil biomes: goblins are the only race that can live in evil biomes in vanilla, and there's gotta be some reason for that, since they're not exactly a hardy race. Evil biomes also encourage more death and chaos, so the reward should make it quite worth it. I've a few ideas for what the reward could be like, but I'm just tossing ideas out:
1. Reanimation is good, somehow. Use reanimated corpses for effective defense, and, if possible, maybe allow some control over what reanimates and what doesn't to eventually negate the bad part of evil while still letting you laugh as the dwarves fight the corpses of their last invasion.
2. Some evil-only materials are quite useful for industry. Perhaps some evil plant is really good for making charcoal, or syndromes can be captured and spread everywhere for defense reasons.
3. Acid. Remove wear on worn metal gear, incinerate your tantruming peasants, process more advanced ores, and accelerate production, all at the small cost of embarking somewhere evil with whatever exotic crap you need to produce acid. For those not in evil biomes, perhaps a very limited way to produce small amounts of it could be made so that advanced ore processing isn't entirely off-limits.
To counter the easy-to-get peasants and lack of required food, another punishment and chaos supplement should be that they're very prone to anger. This is pretty agreed upon, goblins are always the crazies.
To deal with these angry peasants, the suggested solution is assisted suicide: mass raiding! While orcs do have the big raiding culture for profit, goblins seem to use it as a way to get rid of their useless goblins, least in vanilla, since dwarf forts are just death traps. If they win, they come back with actually useful slaves. If they lose, they're dead and no longer a problem. Win-win!
Slaves could basically just function as additional workers, cranking out crap for your own use. They'd also give a reason to have at least a little food industry. As a supplement to slaves, trolls and a few other of the big, dumb, lumbering sentients (maybe ogres could be part of the reward for being in an evil biome?) could be used for basically the same purpose, albeit also being able to serve as warriors.
Very slow military skill growth should take effect, perhaps with a workshop to give basic training, to give you an army of competent and proficient rabble armed in whatever metal they can find.
I feel like goblins should be a different take on the other races and instead not really have a big progression tree. They rely on rapid overwhelming of their foes with brute force and numbers to do things, not planned expansion and growth.
The one thing I don't really have a place for is baby snatching. Since goblins are so expendable, it's not exactly a place for children to grow up in: the dark fortress is goblin daycare, not the pits that import goblins and export death.
