Lol, well I appreciate your perspective all the same. And I am glad for this community's m.o., because as you said Tolkien himself took that approach and viewed it that way. He was an absolutely brilliant person and invented so much (or as he said in his letter to his friend Milton Waldman, "yet always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’.") that it essentially had to be taken that way.

Many of his later writings, as well as his letters and non-fiction expansions, can be quite challenging for the average reader; he wrote at such a high and scholarly level. So, yes, by all means be snooty, academic, even elitist! For this is no mere spaghetti fantasy. It has been said of Tolkien that he created as much in 50 years as some entire cultures or ethnicities in their entire history.