Absoulutely. If Shakespeare had only written Hamlet and a bunch of dirty limericks, would he be a talentless hack? Is Tolkien a horrible writer? After all, his only major work is Lord of the Rings.
If Shakespeare had only written Hamlet, he'd be "Oh that guy who wrote Hamlet, right..." and yeah, would definitely NOT be a particularly important figure in the history of English writing. Body of work does count for something - for Shakespeare, it's why he's such a big deal. He didn't knock it out of the park once - he did it over, and over, and over again.
Tolkien was an academic as well as a fiction writer, which you seem to forget, and not only wrote LotR and The Hobbit, but created a huge amount of surrounding material, and operated significantly in the academic sphere, as well as being involved with the Inklings and so on (so influential and perhaps influenced there).
Also, you present an utterly false and worthless dichotomy. So the only things a writer can be are:
A) Amazing and beyond criticism.
or
B) A talentless hack.
You're really pretty much DEFINING "false dichotomy" there, dude... what utter nonsense.
In reality, Tolkien is a vastly important writer, and very talented at certain aspects of writing, but not so talented at others. I'll leave the discussion of the details for another day, but he's neither a talentless hack, nor beyond criticism. I fear you may be a little biased in this area, given your forum name, of course.
Like Gygax and Arneson, what Tolkien does merit, regardless of the quality of his work (even if it were crap, which it was not, thankfully) is special mention because of his extreme importance to the fantasy literature genre - he basically created it - he didn't intend to, but functionally, he did. Sometimes his actual direct influence is overstated (relatively few fantasy writers today, major or minor, are directly influenced by him, and virtually none use similar world-building methods or the like), but that LotR had that effect is utterly undeniable.
I was actually referring to later versions of D&D. There are some great rpgs out their that ARE wonderfully designed. As for D&D, not so much. And yes, that's my opinion, and I could give a crap whether you think it has value or not.
If you really consider all versions of D&D post-1E drivel, I am surprised you follow new editions at all. There is no possibility that you will not consider 5E drivel, if you considered 2E, 3E, and 4E such. So I suspect that either you overstate your position, or you should probably stay out of 5E threads.
I could say the same about 4e D&D, except in that case the art IS horrible, but I'd be lambasted as an edition warrior due to the double standard here.
No, you could not, because certain things can be objectively analyzed, and you would be directly contradicting yourself! 4E is, as much as you may hate it, tightly focused, and extremely well-organised. The former fact is indeed why most people who dislike 4E, dislike it - it doesn't have the breadth or loose-ness of math that previous editions had, which can cause it to become hyper-focused on tactical combat and stress a lot of people out when modifying it.
So it wouldn't be edition-warring, it'd just be obvious nonsense, and people would be confused as to why you were saying it. Just because one dislikes a game, doesn't mean one can randomly criticise it for things that aren't true - I mean, I dislike Vampire: The Masquerade, Revised, but I would never ding it for having terrible mechanics or organisation (certainly it largely improved on prior editions in both departments), whereas I would ding it for "Not getting your own game" (as pretty clearly shown by the reversion to less hard-horror-y and more gothic-vampire-y tropes in V:tR and V:tM20).
On art, much as I
dislike 4E's art (and I do), if that's "horrible" (which it may well be), then you need a much strong descriptor for DJ's art. Though perhaps "the apotheosis of bland" would be apposite.
It's been ages since I looked at DJ, but Gary's biggest mistake was trying to divorce himself from copyright. He went out of his way to NOT use any terms from D&D. PC became avatar, there are 18 stats instead of 6, etc. It was also a multi-genre game, much like Gurps. At least TSR thought it enough competition it to bury it forever.
The terminology is not a problem - virtually every non-D&D RPG uses a lot of odd terms. The problem is the mechanics, which is exacerbated by organisation, and the nails are driven into coffin by the default setting (Aerth?), which is ditchwater-dull and shallow-as-can-be, far less interesting than something like Oerth.
Whatever you think of Gary, every rpg publisher since is merely a tribute band.
No. Every OSR game and Retro-Clone, yes. 2E. Yes. Beyond that. No. By that logic, every rock musician is just a tribute band for Big Joe Turner or someone.
That's particularly insulting to Marc Miller and Traveller, I note, which was a hugely important game on a number of levels, and appeared in 1977 (and had basically no mechanical inspiration from D&D, and the conceptual inspiration could arguably be traced to things before D&D). Don't even get me started on how overlooked C&S and Tekumel are these days, either. With all the revisionism you're indulging in, you'd think D&D was alone, and never borrowed ideas from other games.
The most effective way to be an edition warrior is to act as though your opinion is the correct one, and not merely one taste variation among many. 
