I believe that in general, the magical creatures of D&D have lost their magical mojo because they are all either redressed animals or redressed people. It's not just a problem with drakes. Dragons in D&D or either merely dangerous animals or merely diabolical humans that happen to have wings and really bad morning breath.
In my world, true Dragons are the incarnate rage of wounded creation that resulted from the breaking of the world during the first gods war - the offspring of the mind and body of the mad goddess Tiamat, who boundless rage was provoked by the murder of her family during the god's war. They are the inferno, the tempest, the hurricane, the flood, the blizzard, and the earthquake made flesh. They are breathing hungering natural disasters that exist to spread ruination. They are nightmares. The are in essence a form of native outsider. The lesser drakes incarnate the lesser dangers of the natural world that have resulted since the breaking of creation - the worst, the Wyvern represents all the natural world that has become poisonous and unwholesome. According to myth, several of the lesser drake species were tamed by some of the great saints among the Free Peoples, representing the Free Peoples actually fulfilling (as a rarity) their divine commission to heal the broken world. Other scholars insist that some of the lesser drakes were always fairy folk that had taken up draconic form, or that the draconic form prexisted Tiamat among the fairy folk and was adopted by her and as such the other myths are just so much nonsense. Certainly it is true that Dragons like fairy folk have a strong and mystical connection to nature. Whether maurading dragons cause natural disasters, or impending natural disasters attract dragons is not known - but rarely does one happen without the other.
Whatever is true, a very small number of the lesser drake species are not actively hostile unless provoked and indeed are considered signs of good fortune.
At this time, I've never decided if their are any good true dragons (the metallics) in my world. I'm leaning to 'no' because I've have seen the existence of good dragons create typical deprotagonizing the PC problems from having powerful NPCs around in the past, but as the myth of the reformed drake shows, I have a dormant mechanism for introducing them but it would have involve a truly epic triumph of good or evil before I'd tap into that.
