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Now, I may be going a bit too far here, but it seems to me that those wanting more M-e novels are the same poeple who preferred the movies to the book, & who, as far as the book goes, preferred the Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli storyline over the Frodo/Sam/Gollum one. They probably also prefer playing the computer games over actually reading the books anyway. What they want seems to be to have Tolkien's world turned into a series of hack & slash sword & sorcery 'epics'.
Given the choice of reading unpublished works like The Fall of Arthur, the New Volsungasaga, or even Tolkien's translation of Beowulf or a new trilogy by some fantasy writer like Steven Erikson or Robert Jordan, full of big battles & Elven warriors & Wizards (preferably young Wizards who they could 'identify with'), they'd choose the latter. In other words, they aren't Tolkien fans, they're fantasy fans. The fact that if this kind of trash was published as a 'continuation' of Tolkien's work it would wreck any chance of him being seen as a serious literary artist by simply confirming the prejudice of the 'Literati' that Tolkien just wrote trivial juvenilia with no real depth or value, is neither here nor there to them, as they just want some cool stories about Middle-earth (preferably without the 'boring' stuff about Hobbits trudging through Mordor - 'just give us shield-surfing Elves, & stubbly heroes killing Orcs, please!').
In short, I think this is all about the desire of fanboys & Leggy fanciers for more trashy Dungeons & Dragons stuff. Tolkien was a poor writer as far as they're concerned, but came up with some decent ideas for books (preferably ones that will be turned into movies as quickly as possible after publication, so that they don't have to actually read them) by 'better' writers.
Look, the bookshops are full of enough sub standard Tolkien rip-offs to keep those who want them busy for decades to come. I don't see the point in licensing a bunch of hacks to produce another stupid Sword & Sorcery franchise.
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