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God yes. The number of people who seem to confuse LotR for the Belgariad when criticizing it. Tolkien has many flaws as an author, but LotR is not remotely a by the numbers example of the genre it spawned except on the very very, very surface.

A friend of mine pointed out the curse of Tolkien's legacy: that so many people have imitated all of his tropes so extensively that now Tolkien *himself* feels derivative, through no fault of his own.

I actually disagree with this to an extent. Like a lot of the overdone narrative tropes of fantasy are actually Edgar Rice Burroughs plus Dungeons & Dragons, and much less Tolkien. Like elves, dwarves, and orcs in the modern sense originate with him, but the versions people imitate are mostly Gygax.

Tolkien does a bunch of stuff which every single highly derivative work (e.g. Shannara) basically just ignores, most notably his making the primary protagonist Frodo and not Aragorn.