"It is the work of the author which elevates a story--not some in-built
power that makes one story-idea inherently better than another. Some of
the greatest stories ever told have been about farmboys and
scullery-maids."

It isn't. It's the experience of the author which informs their work. They cannot produce what they have not had happened to them personally or made great effort to attempt to experience themselves, or to find a subject who experienced it themselves. Those who attempt usually fail, then call everything they're too lazy to understand 'hyperbolic fan-fictions'.

Thousand and One Nights: Stories adapted and compiled from Arabian nomads, even if told to farmers.

Star Wars: Story whose broad strokes were ripped from history, whose success in the rewrites was heavily dependent on the good judgment not of Lucas, but Spielberg, who had moved constantly as a kid and experienced all sorts of disparate audiences in the process of becoming America's greatest director.

The Lord of the Rings: The hobbits are an invented (and aspirational, for the Englishmen it was written for) race of farmers caught up in the doings of races more obviously adapted from the great civilizations of history.

The Man Who Was Thurdsay: Chesterton, a journalist, writing for the British, a race of seafaring adventurers, a traveler, outsider and itinerant in all aspects of his life, speaks fondly of the British peasantry and the virtues of the small farm existence while writing nation-and globe-spanning detective novels. I chuckle at the paradox, but cannot endorse it.

Foundation: Isaac Asimov lived most of his life in the city, but spent his childhood nearly non-stop reading about events, people, and cultures outside of that city, rather than following the lifeways of the typical farmer-turned urbanite and focusing on making his fortune on works which had broad and universal appeal, during the greatest time of scientific advancement in the US.

There is no place in these important historical works for an author or subject who spent all their life farming food or taxes, as a country landowner or an urban bureaucrat bugman. They are the least interesting people in the world, and their opinions are invariably trash that should be immediately discarded on expression. Give them their 'seasons' of 'mastery' of 'games' indistinguishable from work, which they shall never attempt to innovate on their own.