Unfortunately you just cannot simply take English as it's spoken in your country and assume it will apply universally and without change across all English speaking countries even as you and I now mostly successfully converse in English. The roots of words can be interesting and sometimes informative to know but it's not the whole story and ignoring actual usage will never garner a true understanding. It sounds like it's pretty important avoid the word in the US, but not so in Australia. It's not totally neutral here, it's still swearing and you won't hear a school teacher saying it to children, but it's also not coming from the same place in terms of meaning as in the US or UK for example. Sometimes it's an insult, essentially meaning a bad or objectionable person, sometimes it's used in much the same way as "mate", other times it can simply mean "person/people". Much like English itself, context is important and you have to know the background and contextual cues to understand which meaning to take.

You should come over here some time, you might like it, the weather is nice, we share a lot in common with the US, so you'd feel right at home but there's just enough interesting differences to be exotic and provide opportunities to learn something about the world you didn't know before. I can tell you're well meaning and I think people will probably appreciate that too.