I’m with you @actingpower. I’ve gone through all those options as well.
As for whether the goal is arbitrary, IF each character in a story represented an entire human mind, then I think the goal would be arbitrary. Every character would be their own protagonist. Therefore the MC, as the audience’s window into the story, would always be the one we accept as the story protagonist.
But if you accept Dramatica, then each character in a story represents only a portion of a human mind and it takes all of them to add up to one human mind. So while each character has their own purposes and motivations and thoughts on the goal, the story itself, as a single mind, should only be able to see the goal as one thing.
That said, I still don’t know a great all-encompassing solution for how to make peace with MC-as-antagonist/good-guy issue. But I think a lot of it has to do with the connotations we bring to Dramatica terminology. Because we are used to thinking of an antagonist as a bad guy or a villain, it doesn’t feel right to think of JB as an antagonist. But if you move beyond the traditional meaning and only look at the Dramatica definition, I think the problem goes away. If you replace protagonist and antagonist with Thing1 and Thing2, would we still have a problem saying that Blofeld represents Pursue and Bond represents Avoid? I wouldn’t think so.
Way I see it, Bond and MI6 or whatever they are called are pursuing peace in general, but as far as any one story is concerned the specific Goal isn’t keeping overall general peace, but preventing the plot that is disrupting the peace. And I presume Blofelds goal isn’t to avoid peace(unless he’s like the Joker and just wants to create chaos, I don’t know, I haven’t seen many Bond films). It’s to destroy major industries. I again presume, but as far as the story being told, i would think he’s not avoiding industry (at least not within the OS, maybe as a personal issue) but pursuing destruction. So that’s where the goals of the separate characters come together. One is pursuing destruction, the other avoiding.
Edit: jims article explains that Bond is theoretically the antagonist but in practice is the protagonist as he is for the resolution of the inciting incident, which would also seem to solve die hard. that makes sense. going to have to watch the beginning of How to Train Your Dragon again to figure out how it works in that one, though)