It didn't seem so at the time, but one of the smartest decisions the D&D designers made recently was to remove ASIs from character race and instead make them free-floating. (They really should complete the job and just build them into ability score generation more generally, or indeed just drop them, but that's another rant.) The net effect of this was to make race a largely unimportant decision, which seems counter-productive, but was actually very wise.
The thing is, in D&D the choice of class is, by an order of magnitude, the most important decision that will be made for the character. (If multiclassing is used, the choice of classes has that distinction, but that's pretty much hair-splitting.) What that means is that traditionally players will choose their class first, and then build everything else to fit that choice - and since the ASIs were by far the most valuable part of race design, that meant choosing the race for the best ASIs for the class. You'd see lots of elven rogues, but no orcish wizards.
By removing the ASIs from class, they made the choice of race very much a "free hit" - players were suddenly free to choose any race that they felt was interesting, without having to worry that the choice would compromise the effectiveness of their character.
(And that, incidentally, is why the decision to move the ASIs to backgrounds, and indeed to tie backgrounds to feats, is so terrible - the choice of background was until recently another "free hit" because the package of stuff was relatively trivial. But by tying it to two important things, they've now made the choice extremely important. Or, again, they would have had they not also made backgrounds entirely customisable, and thus binned any and all value they have.)
The lesson here is to be careful about making decisions 'important', because doing so has a perverse effect of reducing variety - players will make the most important decision first, and then make all the other important decisions to reinforce that.
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