I would like to play as a Jedi or Sith, but if both orders were almost gone, I think that other force traditions would arise to fill the gap.  If nothing else, Force sensitives would have come across, if not searched for, knowledge of the ancient orders.  You could even say that the Force led them to the info.

In my case, I was thinking that either I was born on Dathomir and originally learned their force tradition (or for a Jedi character, I was raised by a Gray Paladin) or, maybe, I was a force-sensitive archaeologist that found a sith holocron in a dig on Korriban.