I agree with this post and it explains the reasons why I've stopped including Tolkienian races in my work. I'm gonna write a really long comment about my own particular views on the subject.

I think it's a little bit strange how stealing from Tolkien is considered totally okay, when stealing from any other author raises eyebrows.

If I were to include giant sandworms in my setting, or, say, a spice which gave magical powers to those who ate it, my world would be compared to Dune.

If I were to include laser swords, it would be compared to Star Wars.

If I were to include a hermaphrodite species or something along those lines, it would be compared to The Left Hand of Darkness.

If I were to include royal power struggles, my world would be compared to Game of Thrones.

Any time I want to draw inspiration from a non-Tolkien writer, I have to be very careful to cover my tracks, lest I be accused of having no imagination, or, worse, being a plain old plagiarist. It wouldn't even occur to me to include a species in my work called Wookies or Gethenians or White Walkers.

Yet, people steal from Tolkien all the time and it's considered totally fine. This is partly due to precedent (D&D and videogames stealing from Tolkien in the past and getting away with it), but it's also a strange cultural/artistic blindspot. Plagiarism isn't something we should avoid just to meet the minimum requirements of the law, it's something we should avoid out of respect for other writers and out of respect for ourselves.

I really agree with this part of the original post:

Maybe we need to expand our literature, read many different genres, get influenced, let our minds wonder to silly places. I like to explore my own worlds, and your worlds, I like to explore the worlds of writers, of "casuals" of office workers day dreams. You know what I don't want to explore? Tolkien's world. If I wanted to do that I would read Lord of the Rings, or watch the movies. Because thats the best Tolkien you're ever going to get. And you will never, create something as worth engaging with as Tolkien's world, if you're using his tropes. Because they're not yours. We all live indefinitely different lives, come from a million different places, have billions of different experiences. Lets express these differences, the different thoughts, ideas , worlds they have evoked in our heads, and share them. Create your own races. You are engaging in escapism, make your world unique, let your planet spin around two suns, let your peoples all be different races from the 6 moons that revolve around a green planet, who vie for control over its resources.

Tolkien had a particular worldview and a particular set of experiences which influenced his writing. The reason LoTR is so good is because it's the product of one man's unique creative vision, honed by a lifetime's experiences and decades of work and thought. If he wasn't English, if he wasn't Catholic, if he wasn't a linguist, and if he hadn't lived through the World Wars, I doubt his world would look quite the same.

So how could I possibly do Tolkien-style fantasy better than the man himself, when I didn't create any of it, and when I share none of his worldview and life experiences? When I used to rip off Tolkien wholesale, everything I created was lifeless and uninteresting, because I wasn't actually creating anything. It wasn't until I threw all that out and started actually making something new that anyone took any interest in my world.

A few caveats:

First, it is possible to rip off Tolkien well, if you really put effort into it and really immerse yourself in the source material. You can see this, for example, in Peter Jacksons LotR film trilogy. If you watch some of the behind the scenes videos you can see the immense amount of work that went into copying Tolkien correctly. These were incredibly talented people working tirelessly for years to bring the books to life. It would have probably been easier for them to just make something new than to struggle so much to represent Tolkien's world.

The other way to copy Tolkien (and still produce something good) is to make it so different that it's barely Tolkien anymore. For example, the Red Elves designed by /u/RasterAlien are actually pretty interesting to me, because they're so unlike Tolkien's elves that they're basically a new species. (I'm not sure if the original post was criticizing this world specifically, but if it was, I disagree with that.) The term "Red Elf" is just more memorable and clear than "Damijani" or another made up word. The distinction in World of Warcraft between Night Elves, High Elves, and Blood Elves is also interesting enough that it almost makes me forgive the derivative nature of the concept. I think I would prefer it if all of these species were simply called something besides elves, but I'm not going to say that all this interesting, creative work is worthless just because it's drawn a bit of inspiration from Tolkien.

But, the majority of Tolkien ripoffs fall into neither of these two categories (very faithful or very original) and instead end up in the middle somewhere. Worlds that are basically just Middle Earth, but without the same level of depth and craftsmanship, that neither accurately represent Tolkien's world nor invent many new concepts. It takes hard work to copy Tolkien well, and it takes hard work to create something new and interesting, but it doesn't take much work to "create" an inferior, lifeless version of Lord of the Rings or a standard D&D setting. Which is probably why so many people do it. They might also be doing it because they feel obligated to, like it's the "standard" thing to do and nobody would like it if they diverged from it. Thinking "oh I'll do the easy thing" or "oh I'll just do the standard thing everyone else is doing" is toxic to actual creativity.

A lot of people will probably read my post and take it personally. They'll think it means I'm saying their worlds are bad. But that's not really the case. I don't think your world is bad, I just think it needs to break free of the elements that aren't truly yours. I want to see worlds that reflect your own unique creativity and your own mind.

TL;DR: You're great, and Tolkien is great, but you're not Tolkien.