RE: The Grimling (Part One of Two in AD&D 2E races)
While I understand your justification for there not being fighters...I could see a possibility for dual class fighters of certain types, for example, fighter/rogues or fighter/assassins. Not all fighters are front line fighters. Hell, now days it's practically more common for fighters to use guerrilla warfare.
Of course, any player using such a class outside of the documentation would have to be keenly aware of how they play them. They start playing on the front lines like a normal fighter, the DM might have to step in. It would likely be only a character that focuses more on fighting skills, for the rare case where they may have to use them.
Not like such a character would exactly be easy to play in any case though, regardless of class. You would have to come up with a justification of why they were in a party and constantly consider their background. I would guess that in most cases they'd be the scout, but considering fighting one on one is so much against their normal thinking, even when a party enters combat, they might stay on the sidelines, occasionally backstabbing or using a ranged weapon.
I've always looked at PCs as outliers; 1% of the population that does what they want to do, so motivations arent as important as staying true to the underlying character basis...characters exrtremley out of whack with the societal norm go advertuting to getaway lol
as far as fighters go for this race, the guy that would like to mix it up? The testing would probably winnow him out
However, the way I always see things is this, whatever a dm and a player want to do with the rule ideas they have been given is up to them...when 2e dropped assasins and devils we just lold and kept using 1e rules adaptions