What characters would likely come back.

[Alayan]

In fact, it’s not about hitting a quota;
"pretty silly" I don't think a large roster necessarily means every single character has to compete in the same race,
and I’m not asking for 500 characters.

The silly quote was specifically about STK not having enough standard karts in 1.x and needing to have 2 Tux, or 2 Xue, etc. to have enough racers when playing with the maximum number of karts. So you got the meaning the wrong way around!

Note also that I didn't say anywhere there won't be more karts for Evolution. I was simply explaining why one shouldn't expect STK to include any and all open-source mascots.

Did Debian even have the right to remove Beastie. It isn't there game and you have all the rights to add him back.

SuperTuxKart is free and open-source. Modifying the game and distributing the modified game is expressly allowed as long as the modified source code is provided.

Now, whether doing the changes silently (for the end-user) and while keeping all the official branding is just fine, that's another question. When changes are just meant to allow the game to run properly (such as the small patches some BSD distros apply to compile SuperTuxKart) that's great. When those changes substantially modify the player's experience, it's a problem.

Long ago, Debian really wanted to compile STK to work with a system Irrlicht, which had lower defaults for various values than STK's bundled Irrlicht, leading to a badly broken game for their users, who ended up thinking that SuperTuxKart was the problem...