While I do find Astarion's (cut?) backstory intriguing, and I wish they'd worked with the idea that was introduced and seemingly forgotten that his death was a deliberate setup (the PC can point out to Astarion that Cazador just happening to show up seems super coincidental, and in the same conversation Astarion says that Cazador works through proxies and usually has several layers of plans going on)...
It was so obvious that Cazador set it up, because it's not like he took random walks in dark alleys, he has spawns for that. But then it went nowhere.
...I think making him that outright evil from the start damages the cycles of abuse theme his story currently centers around. The
whole Cazador-Velioth scenario, and Astarion's ascension,
very deliberately illustrates the process of victims becoming their abusers, when in this case Astarion would start out as an abuser and I suspect that's why it didn't make it in the final game. To clarify - Astarion was always a bad person and we can infer from several things in the release game that he was a terrible magistrate. But there's a difference between 'spoiled noble who didn't care who his decisions hurt as long as he got to enjoy prestige and power' and 'selling prisoners to vampires for the promise of becoming a vampire himself someday.'
Yeah, writing a story about the cycle of abuse and then saying "he asked for it" is not a good idea for obvious reasons.
