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Yet I think we have to be careful to acknowledge that there is more than one perspective
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Child, I couldn't have put it better myself, and I stand convicted of approaching Tolkien far too much and far too often through the lens of literary critical practice (and possibly even theory). And this is ironic, for I have written elsewhere of how much I think there is to gain from a more 'historical' approach like the one you speak of so well and so convincingly. This really does buttress the philological analyses I'm wanting to move into as well, as I want to inquire into the historical origins of the names and then seek to find their applicability to us in the here and now.
Bethberry you wrote:
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if there is nothing else in a text to support such esoteric or recondite use of names, then I would argue that the use of such names alone reflects weak writing. There ought to be other signifiers in the text which support that reference
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I would argue that there are any number of such signifiers that not only invite but demand us to recover the etymology of the names. Off the top of my head I think of Tom Bombadil's explanation of who he is to the hobbits, Treebeard's wonderful delineation of the importance of names and words (doesn't he say that a proper name is the story of the thing?) and the constant renaming of Aragorn (Strider the Ranger, Aragorn the heir, Elessar the King). When I am next near to my books I shall dig up some relevant quotes, but I think everyone knows the moments I am referring to.
Time and again in the books it crops up that to know the name of a thing -- more significantly, to know the meaning of the name of a thing -- is to know the thing (Middle-Earth is clearly pre-post-structuralist in that regard! No split between the signifier and the signified there!). Given this insistence, I think that it's fair to argue that recovering a character's name is probably the clearest and best way to uncover authorial intent.
Your point,
Bb, that this should not and cannot be taken as the only or sole mode of characterization is very well taken, though.