Another way to look at it is that Roberts might be more of an optimist, instead insisting that people are more or less "good", operating from his or her value of "good" and that normal conflict arises from disagreement. The only true evil comes from aberrant, insane behavior. Given his love for chatty, clever characters, I suspect that this might be the case. Roberts is given to characters that engage in a LOT of discourse. Communication is generally not a skill you ascribe to people that enjoy killing everyone. Who would you talk to? As a result, in order to be truly "evil" you have to start at "sociopath" and work downward.
I would go further on this and say that if season 2 wasn’t your thing, skip everything up to “The Mutineers Trilogy”. This is around the time I feel Roberts starting coming back to MTMTE form (coincidentally, around the time they told him to start wrapping up )
Huh, makes one wonder who approached him to write a comic... Roche? I assume IDW gave him an ongoing series after the success of those issues in Chaos Theory. I too liked it at the time - in a mountain of terrible comics by Costa, it was a breath of fresh air. But after too much of the same style... I have to disagree. Many of the best sort of villains are the chatty ones. The Joker, for example? Heck most versions of Starscream love to talk a lot to their enemies, despite being murderous - they are vain and narcissistic, they need the attention.