I don’t know about the Hobgoblin’s legacy or any of that. What I do know is that the character was in a pretty sorry state in 1997 after a number of attempts to reinvent him–giving him cybernetics or making him a demon and so forth. It was really my assistant of the period Glenn Greenberg who pushed to do that project. He knew that Roger had intended the Hobgoblin to be somebody other than the person who was eventually revealed (in a reveal that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense in context at the time), and a conversation confirmed that the person in question was still a viable candidate. Plus, Roger was and is one of the great Spider-Man writers. So why not do Hobgoblin Lives?