Going back to the original post and the context, I would recommend starting out with a few, maybe 6-8 well crafted, well thought out races and expand on that slowly to fill in the roleplay or combatant types deemed necessary.
You can have 50+ NPC type races but carefully choose and develop those you allow PCs to become. By development I mean establish a value, a unique function in the world, a unique spell/skill tree etc and modify the world to accomodate the unique aspects of those new races. IMHO it's much better to make what exists rewarding and playworthy THEN expand it to make it a superlative of the original.
The same tenets apply to classes, make the first few awesome and expand slowly making the new ones fit into the world before you actually enable them.
I view it all as an empiricle process and I've been well served by that view. If you jump in over your head from the start, it's really hard to ever get ahead of the issues created.
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