Raltoid

It’s not like he sat on his ass before then: He went to Oxford until his early 20s, then WW1, illness, working on the OED, working at Pembrooke, translating the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, etc. his work on translating Beowulf drastically changed how it was percieved(before he pointed out the poetic nature, it was viewed as a childish tale of monster battles).

Not to mention that he was writing LOTR in stages during WW2, and he was a lecturing professor at the time.

I wouldn’t necessarily blame the writers for the shift. The bigwigs making the decision believe that using existing IP means that half the marketing job is already done.

I don’t blame them for the shift at all, that’s all on the higher ups who only see dollars. I do however blame them for doing things like not engaging with the source material and actively changing character personalities to fit their own idea of the story. Specially when it is so drastic that it goes against the overall story and it has to be retconned or explained in unbelivable ways.

(Yes I’m still bitter about The Witcher show)

The Book of Revelation was kinda like a revenge fantasy for early Christians experiencing persecution by the Greco-Roman empire.

The lake of fire was not for human souls.

While Revelation isn’t exactly the best source as you say, it still has this part regarding a lake of fire:

But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.

Revelation 21:8 (NIV)

IMO the core issue started with script writers and produces wanting to tell a story and trying to mold that story into a trek universe.

That’s sadly been a very common thing in recent years. Writers noticed that fewer and fewer original shows were being made, and latched onto existing IPs or adaptations. And then try to force their idea onto that, which drastically change how people act in comparison and often entire premises of how story-universes work. And Discovery had staff officers acting more over-the-top with emotional outbursts than in Lower Decks. So I might finish it with the “they’re high on spores all the time” headcanon.

Have you not heard the story of Ælfwine?

He was initially the fictional narrator/author of Tolkien’s works, later just referenced as a character. Born in the late 800s(by our reckoning) England, and he learned of the story when he was the first human who sailed to Valinor in thousands of years. He is a distant descendant of Elves which probably helped, but at that point most humans probably are related to them.

It was left out of The Silmarillion, but is mentioned in some other works released by Christopher.

Benefit of data managers: Tags for easier searching and grouping, grouping that is folder agnostic, easily choosing a thumbnail, and in text focused ones you can usually search the content of the files from one location and easily look through the results for the correct one, etc.