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I stand corrected on the Tim Kirk illustrations (which was only a dim and faulty recollection)- it may be because I personally didn't like them.
I understand what you're saying about the monsters- one of CT's problems with Peter Jackson was that, in his opinion, the monsters were the only thing PJ was really interested in, at the expense of much else. I note that at least one calendar includes a Nasmith painting of Fingon and Gothmog which was not included in the illustrated Sil- but then Glaurung and Morgoth do appear there.
However, I'll hold my ground on illustrated editions: the Estate retains the intellectual property rights over pictures deriving from JRRT's work. This of course is fuzzier with LR and Hobbit where Saul Zaentz gets a claim too: but there's no grey area with regard to Silmarillion. Nobody, not even HarperCollins, can publish Silmarillion-based illustrations without approval. As indeed Nasmith's comments suggest.
Aside, re: Simon Tolkien--
if you read his original Telegraph interview carefully, you'll see that Simon never says precisely that the breach with his father occurred in relation to the movies- necessarily, since it is in fact far older. Lawyer that he is, he cleverly said,"After that, I was excluded from the board:" technically true, if one doesn't accept the invitation to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but understands "after that" in a strictly chronological sense; and perceives that "excluded" means, literally, not included- Simon was not chosen for the board when it was created in 1999. But one can't help but suspect that Simon parsed his statement with care, in the full expectation that our beloved nitwit press would misinterpret it in precisely the way they did.
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