Regarding Dragons

[King of Nowhere]

I can confirm that all the liches I've ever seen in a D&D games where just "I need a powerful undead creature, and we're not in a pyramid so I can't take a mummy lord" or "I was asleep in my tomb and you tried to pillage it so I will kill everyone of you".

enters the lich esmeralda.

half a millennia ago, esmeralda was an adventurer. even after she married and raised a family, she still wandered around with her party after loot from time to time.
once, in her quests, she killed a young dragon. she didn't consider that the dragon had a mother, and the dragon's mother killed emeralda's family and bound their souls (yes, I totally got that from vaarsuvius).
esmeralda spent the rest of her life looking for her family, but the dragon disappeared. as it became clear she would be unable to complete her task within her natural life span, she sought to become a lich.

nowadays, esmeralda is still looking for her family. she is always developing new divination spells that would hopefully succeed where the previous ones failed, and this makes her the world's best diviner by a fair margin. she sinks a lot of money into her research, so she will often sell her services, at a premium. and she let everyone know that the moment her family is recovered, she will destroy herself to rejoin them, and all her possessions will go to whoever helped her.
she is kind and grandmotherly, and she offers tea and biscuits to any who comme visit her. she does not look evil, though the negative energy of a lich would drive crazy anyone who is not. some theorize that she found a workaround for that. few actually know that from time to time she looks for a good happy family in a remote part of the world and kill them all, to ensure that she stays evil. she doesn't like doing it, but she muses that at least they'll stay together.

esmeralda was a plot device that the players could contact whenever they were stuck with some mistery or needed more info. later, they managed to solve the puzzle of her lost family; it was the first time they really broke WBL

Demons do not even have the subtlety of actually caring about having any emotion other than hatred, and I've never encountered one that pronounced more than one full sentence before trying to destroy everything.

After many trials, the party finally defeated for good their first archvillain, the elf Tharivol Amakiir, expert in plotting and manipulation.
Tharivol's soul went to the lower planes, where demons conscript souls to fight and expand their dominions.
Tharivol was to face a similar fate, but he started talking. he'd always been good at talking. He managed to persuade the pit fiend Babaugon that his skill at plotting would make him more valuable as an ally than as a minon.
Within a few months, Babaugon and Tharivol became genuine friends, conquering vast swates of lower planes together. Tharivol even attracted a succubi girlfriend, Roxy, who was impressed by his evil, and especially his cunning ways of being apparently kind while sowing evil in the long run.

when the party went to the lower planes on an unrelated quest, they met the whole cadre. there, Tharivol thanked them for defeating him and causing his death, as he was much happier there than he was while alive. the demons were also quite happy to meet the adventurers, saying they owed them a favor.

when the party had to manage a large war, they were able to call some demons to fight for them.

I don't dislike dragons because GM's have overused them. I dislike them because they're overused - and used deplorably poorly - in every bit of source material I know of.

Ah, well, fine with that. we all agree that they were overused, and used poorly most times. we are repliying that they can be used well, though, and each one of us has developed some way to give them compelling motivations.
we are not arguing against your personal dislike. we were just arguing that while they were used poorly, that's a problem of how they were used, and not of dragons themselves.