The Minthara problem is not about whether or not a good player should be able to recruit an evil character. We already can do that with Astarion, Lae'zel, and Shadowheart. Like, someone tried to dunk on someone else by pointing out that Minthara is Lolth-sworn, but Shadowheart is a devotee of a real piece-of-shit goddess herself when we first meet her. The game cleverly tricks you by giving her a voice-actor that isn't obviously evil-coded and not having her cartoonishly demand that you be a dickhead all the time, but there's no way to interpret Shar-worship except as an evil cult. Lae'zel, on the other hand, is openly an asshole who thinks the weak must perish, which is generally understood to be an evil point of view, and is devoted to a goddess literally known as "The Lich Queen." Astarion may not have any evil religious affiliations, but he has similar approval/disapproval reactions to Lae'zel, his instinct is to acquire power for himself no matter who he has to hurt to get it, and he will cheerfully drink your blood until you're dead if you let him. And all of them can be recruited on a good playthrough, you can keep them for the entirety of that playthrough, and you can change their minds but you don't actually have to! So let's not pretend this is about whether a good player should be able to recruit an evil companion.
I agree, by the way, that it's fine to have companions who aren't available to players of a certain alignment or tendency. I kept expecting Lae'zel to ditch me or attack me, and I was okay with that. That would have made sense! It does not make sense that the only way you can recruit a companion is by doing something she doesn't agree with and wouldn't have wanted you to do, especially when she does not start out any more "evil" than several companions you can recruit as a good player already.
HOWEVER. The one thing that would have to be papered over or altered in a significant way before Larian would probably want to make the requested change, and very possibly the reason they ended up doing what they did, is this question: what possible reason would you have for knocking her out instead of killing her? See, we know that at one point quite late in development they intended for us to be able to do exactly what we're asking for here. There are Minthara dialogue files referencing the tieflings as being alive in Act 2. Karlach and Wyll have dialogue files referencing her pregnancy. What reason could they have had to abandon this possibility? I'm sure the (utterly misguided) notion that evil players should have exclusive rewards was a part of it, but a bigger part, I suspect, is that Larian is trying to make a roleplaying game here. That means a game that doesn't reward or incentivize metagamed approaches to various decisions. You can tell this is a priority for them because of how they did the companion relationships. If you try to metagame for "good endings" for your companions the way gamers usually do (i.e., by just mindlessly farming approval points and letting your companion do whatever they say they want to do) you'll end up with some real dickheads in your party. So it seems clear that Larian is trying as hard as it can to stop you from trying to engineer any particular set of outcomes.
So how, in that spirit, could they currently justify giving us what we want here? The only reason I could have for not killing her is that I read on the internet that you can recruit her as a companion. There is no plausible in-universe reason for me to leave her alive while killing everyone else. You can't even argue that I'm hoping I can recruit her because she has a tadpole, because Ragzlin and Gut have tadpoles too. So why do I kill them and not Minthara? Is it because their names are more obviously evil-henchman-coded? Is it because they're goblins and I'm some kind of racist who makes decisions about killing a person based on how fuckable their race is? They'd have to give us a reason, probably gated behind a pretty steep skill check of some kind, to suspect that she's fighting the Absolute's influence and could be turned if we spare her life. So it's really not so simple as just letting us knock her out.
Oh thank god! I thought I was the only person thinking this about the whole Minthara Problem. I get it, Minthara would be nice to recruit no matter what route you take but it doesn't make sense as going down the route of "I must help The Grove". She's a Goblin leader, that to your knowledge without any meta gaming she is a Lolth-Sworn Drow and is Evil.
