I agree very much, though it's hard to articulate the criticism of what's wrong with...over-guided characterization? It's a problem I had with Robin McKinley's early books, for example; she's very good at complicating the moral inner worlds of heroes, but jarringly, the enemies those heroes face are just evil, grotesquely unhuman, and are only there to be fought and exterminated. The idea seems to be that the problem can be solved by getting rid of certain people, and not only is that not true in real life, it's not true in the moral landscape we tell stories in, either.

I think the really interesting genre for this question is murder mysteries. We start out with a corpse; the corpse is a person that someone tried to solve a problem by getting rid of. Sometimes murder mysteries make the corpse a terrible person that lots of people would have reason to kill; sometimes they make the corpse a person who seems so sympathetic that no one should have wanted to kill them at all. But either way, you have to make the reader care whether the detective finds out who did it, and you have to give them a little insulation from the horror of a person's violent death. The trope requires balance!

When I started working on my 'verse I wanted a story where everyone in the main cast is essential to the resolution of the situation -- even the enemies, antagonists, and anti-heroes. And since then I think it's gotten even more imperative to have stories like this, since there's this infectious temptation to demonize people as if destroying certain groups would solve all our problems. Sigh.