Most if not all of the goblins in the goblin camp are rocking way lower than 15 AC
The thing is, you can actually fairly easily work out how their AC has been changed for each Goblin if you care to. In most cases, they removed pieces of equipment or replaced them with something else. It seems like something you could believe would happen in a disorganized camp (and that Goblin camp is anything but organized).
way higher than 7 HP, depending on their combat role.
The low HP Goblins are there as well in the camp (I have screenshots of all of the Goblins if you are curious), but yes, there are quite a lot on the high end as well. Larian's Goblin bell curve is a bit weird, with lots of Goblins on the 2 extreme ends with hardly any near the middle at 6/7/8.
Of course, some of that AC may be based on gear differences, and some of that HP may be based on level difference, but it's near universal among them.
As I said, I expect most of the changes made were a result of a combination of trying to give the Goblins character and trying to make a Goblin camp a challenge for a level 4 party. Goblins do not exactly have a stellar challenge rating.
That said, I will actually admit that you are correct when it came to the other monsters I found within the goblin camp. The Ogre and Bugbears didn't have much changed in terms of HP, but their AC was increased or lowered by one or two points.
I checked quite a few monsters, including the phase spiders and the spider boss. Animals had the exact same AC but higher HP than the average in the PHB, as they do not use armour. Monsters were all over the place depending on what Larian did to their gear.
However, goblins still make up like 50% of the EA content and no one really knows exactly why Larian decided they had to be altered to such a level, so it's not hard to see where this perception comes from.
I know that all we can do is speculate, but we can do much better in speculating than assuming the reason for the changes is because Larian thinks missing is bad. If that was all they cared about, there wouldn't be monsters with higher AC values than the values in the PHB and there would be a much easier way to make those changes, just change all the Goblins in the same way. Going out of the way to give every Goblin a name and give them some role in Goblin society is going to a lot more work to solve the problem of "missing feels bad" and kind of makes that seem to be an implausible reason for doing so.
Even so, this would sound okay in a vacuum, but it just lends further credence to the idea of exactly how much high ground advantage/low ground disadvantage has such a drastic effect on how people approach combat in this game.
I think high ground giving advantage contributes far more to the perception that its easy to hit things than Larian's changes to monster equipment does.
