I don't think he's really missed it,
Lal. He's just been, I think, rather rhetorically clever at handling the complaint about landscape description.
After all, once he identifies the complaint about too much description as merely as matter of too many words--a strawman argument--he quite niftilly undercuts that with the Emperor's silly request. Then Drout compares two passages which for the most part he praises highly and even lauds them as suitable for a Hemingway style. He hoists the modern critics on their own ... um, criterion.
I think the one or two small points about wording which he objects to are really intended similarly in the strawman vein, to show that they can easily be dismissed, so that in the end he is able to claim that it is not easy to dismiss or critique Tolkien's style.
I suppose it must be his habit of lecturing--starting out with a, shall we say, hot air balloon, pumping it up for analysis, only to demonstrate how it can be deflated. A bit of a pedagogical trick I would say. But as I said, it leaves the larger question of the role and place of landscape description unexamined.
I'd agree that Tolkien certainly needs to be read alongside Hardy. I was ever so tickled to discover that 'kine', the Old English plural for cow, was still used in Yorkshire in Bronte's day.
Oh, and, I had always had the sense that 'thrawn', because it can also mean "contrary, peevish, perverse, sullen, unpleasant" as well as "twisted" and "crooked", was doing a little bit of foreshadowing for the ents.
But this, as I say, is likely Drout's habit of getting his students to refute his points, thereby actually defending the opposite of what he initially purports. I suppose I shall have to read more of his blog to say definitely though.