More of Takisis and her buddies being incompetent isn't as fun as more of the 'Good' gods being monstrously evil, sadly.
Yeah... The whole point of the existing draconians is "hey we have a nonaggression pact but it only covers dragons. We're gonna break it when we're good and ready but in the meantime let's weaken the enemy and build up our own forces in one fell swoop."
That's one of the things I like about dragonlance, good and evil must be balanced so trying to make draconian with evil dragon eggs makes draconian leaning towards good instead.
They weren't turning chromatic dragons into draconians; they were using chromatic dragon eggs, specifically the eggs of the chromatic dragons who'd already died over the course of the war.
Why not just hatch them?
From memory, each egg could create multiple draconians, rather than 1 egg/draconian. This allowed the forces of darkness to quickly swell their numbers.
Agreed. One of the themes I take from the novels and games is that of learning and change, and in a way they never did before.
I'm pretty sure more non-dead dragons come from dragon eggs.
You'd need hundreds of draconians to make that an even trade.
Leaving aside that I'm not sure whether or not a bunch of humans even could hatch dragon eggs (and I doubt that evil dragons would hatch someone else's), you'd then have years, if not decades (or even centuries) of raising the hatchlings to the point where they were large enough, smart enough, and strong enough to make a tangible contribution in the war. Given that this was done near the close of the War of the Lance (as it says on the wiki page I linked to before, emphasis mine: "Noble Draconians were created in an act of desperation near the end of the War of the Lance."), just turning them into draconians was doubtlessly more expedient.
