Indeed if one looks at the treasure tables in 0d&d, the richest haul after dragons is dwarves–an allusion to smaugs usurpation of thorins clan. Small wonder 4 other armies showed up to take the gold from the deceased dragon. If I were an adventurer i’d target dwarves too and offer the goblins a cut of the profit!
One interesting thing I discovered when working on CoZ regards magic items. Arneson often referred to the treasures recovered by characters as “prizes” and I never thought much of it until I started noticing how large, relative to other XP awards, the awards are for discovering magic items. A sword is worth a minimum of 1000 XP per +, and if it has any extra abilities will be worth a whole lot more. OD&D characters can easily get the bulk of thier XP from magic items and most of the rest from gold. They can level up without killing a single monster.