Anyone who wants to play an old-fashioned halfling for an old-fashioned D&D experience at my table is welcome. You'll receive the "regular person" stat array and one-tenth the experience of the other characters, so you can have tons of fun being a better role-player and pretending to serve tea and scones with Barliman Butterbur while the rest of the party is out punching dragons in half.
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It's also not true that halflings don't have an established niche outside of Tolkien; they've slowly, almost unconsciously, been taking over the "small, mischievous troublemaker" archetype. The problem, though, is that a lot of people hate this archetype, since (like "regular folks"), "little scamp" characters often work better in a scripted story than in a game. Halflings seem to be stuck between two problematic fantasy clichés.
