It appears that any goals of your companions are removed and only in place for multi-player 'competitive questing'
That isn't true exactly. Your other companions still have their own goals. It is just up to you to decide if you want to complete them or not and who gets priority when doing so.
The reason they cannot do competitive questing is kind of simple... You are making all the decisions. You cannot work against or around... yourself.
Competative questing is NOT a result of the origins and happen in MP even if everyone chose the "generic" background, no aspirations, and everyone was the same race. What competitive questing is, ALL IT IS, is that everyone doesn't have to agree on a topic. Remember all those times in the first game where you had to play Rock Scissor paper? Replace those with fights and alternate goals and that is competitive questing.
It does feel SOMEWHAT cheap that your companions can't just go "No! this is wrong! I won't stand for this" given that even in Divinity 1 I believe there were breaking points for companions. Yet meh... you would probably dequip them and remove their skill points if you knew it was coming.
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The "Origin" or more accurately "Pre-generated character" ones are... are quests you get from the get-go (or you can only get) that you can decide to play against your friends for.
OR you can work together... OR you can find alternate solutions... OR you can decide it isn't worth it and just give in to your allies.
So if your, for example, a member of the Thieves Guild you MIGHT want to prevent their destruction. You might even start off with a quest to steal something and the person who owns it knows someone is after it and asks the party to stop them. Yet you can always prevent this.
(Honestly this is a HUUUUUUGE FREEKEN REASON to have more then pre-generated character backgrounds. The fact that anyone who played the game will immediately know what your quest is and can circumvent you with metaknowledge)
