By Tolkienesque, I would say, low magic abilities on the part of the protagonists, magical items exist but are fairly rare - sure the Fellowship had a fair bit of loot, but, looking at the Hobbit, there isn't all that much. Monsters are fairly rare (while yes, there's orcs and goblins, actual MONSTERS aren't all that common). That's what Tolkienesque means to me. None of that applies to a DnD setting where monsters are around nearly every corner, magical abilities are not rare in the protagonists - let's face it the standard party of 3 fighters, cleric, wizard and thief means that 1/3 of the party is a spellcaster - and magical items aren't all that rare judging by published modules.
As far as quantity over quality goes, well, I'm willing to stack up the best of the 21st centuries fantasy authors against Howard any day of the week. Let's face it, great prose Howard is not. I'll see your Howard and raise you a Mercedes Lackey, or CJ Cherryh or Donaldson or Pratchett. The authors of today are most certainly not lacking in skill or creativity. Yes, there are crap authors, but, then again, that's always been true. For every Howard or Tolkien, there's a hundred other short story authors lying forgotten in the pages of the pulp books.
You're saying that DnD has had no effect on the popularity of fantasy as a genre. That the rise in popularity of DND and other RPG's has had no effect on Fantasy as a genre. Well, I'd point to R.A Salvatore and Weiss and Hickman to show the mistake of that. Best selling authors whose work has been derived straight from DnD. Would Dragonlance have been half as popular if it was published in the 60's? I don't think so. Would a certain dual wielding DROW made the best sellers list without DND? Not a chance. No one would even know what a drow is without DnD.
Like I said some time ago, it's a virtuous circle. Elements from fantasy were drawn together to make DND. DnD's rise has fueled the rise in the fantasy genre. The rise in the fantasy genre has given rise to the idea that not every setting is required to be Middle Earth or Hyboria in order to be fantasy. That has been ported back into DnD. It goes around and around. The ideas get bashed about, rewritten, revised and the meme passed back, all buffed and shiny.
Is DnD based on the early "Golden Age" fantasy works? Of course. There's no denying it. Does that mean that we should lock DnD into the same forms and ignore the wealth of information brought out by new fantasy authors? Of course not. Both the genre and the game evolve as new ideas and concepts are explored. You can't ever really go back.
It's no longer enough to crank out a dungeon crawl in the middle of the wilderness for no reason other than to give the players something to kill. Dungeons need to have an ecology to increase verisimilitude. Look at the "Worst Modules" thread bouncing around and you'll see people thinking exactly that. Twenty years ago, you didn't need a reason for that orc in the 10 foot room guarding a chest. No one cared. We do now. Because, as gamers, we've evolved and changed, and, well, become considerably more sophisticated. That's an element that has been reflected in fantasy as well. It's not enough just to plunk a serpent cult in the middle of the mountains. Now you need to explore where they get their food and why the heck they are there and not on some comfortable beach somewhere.
I for one, would never want to go back to the days when the DM could simple wave away any sort of nod towards realism and just plunk down 10 different kinds of humanoids in the middle of a ravine with nothing to eat, a half days walk from a fortress. As a DM, I would never want to present this to my players without a pretty good explanation.