"Booty seeking" really had me wincing. I don't object to taking liberties with word order for the sake of good rhythm or putting the right things in the most stressed places, but in these lines above it starts to look like a gimmick very fast. The passage at the beginning of your post strikes more of a chord, but really only because of the obvious links that you mentioned to Tolkien's established works and themes. Tolkien's rhyming poetry may have a tendency towards the tacky, but on occasion (the "Though here at journey's end I lie" poem) it does work, better I would say than what you quoted here. Perhaps this is no worse than most of his other poetry, but I see little reason to call it better; and I definitely don't agree (again, based on the very little you've quoted) that this seems more promising than the Lord of the Rings.
Fair criticism, although that is one of the relatively few "rough spots" in the unfinished poem for me. Why I say it is "better" is in part the treatment of Lancelot, which I chose not to delve into in this short review because I wanted to focus more on the mechanics and less on Tolkien's interesting changes to the events (let's just say that Gawain's disdain/hatred for Lancelot comes across as being more just and indicative of Anglo-Saxon hospitality customs than the hothead griever of the Norman romances). The themes shape up to be very well-executed (the outline of the never-written cantos is frustrating because it promises to fulfill the promise I saw in these 900+ lines) and the lines have more import because I know and love the basic story (and I enjoyed the twists that Tolkien introduced). I guess I didn't state the reasons for my preference for this unfinished tale to his fantasies strongly enough in the review 
The Lord of the Rings, I'm sure you'll agree, should be judged on its own merits, not on those of the works influenced by it. Of course there are many valid criticisms of it that can be made, but it is well-written, a more original work than these Arthurian verses and certainly more notable. If these verses hadn't been written by a man who would later become famous with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I feel they would not have left any lasting impression on the literary world (they won't even as it is).
Yes, but keep in mind that 3-4 years ago, I wrote a series of reviews critiquing the problems I had with LotR's structure, its spotty language, and occasional bad meshing of literary forms. I'm very familiar with the Arthur tales (having read close to a dozen iterations) and what I saw in these verses was a bold experiment, one that is original in the sense that it strips away the accrued layers of romance and attempts to create an alt-Arthur, an ironically more Anglo-Saxon doomed king, with metaphors serving a very different purpose from those of the French poets. As for your last part, that might be an unfair judgment to make, considering the near-total irrelevance Anglo-American poetry of the second half of the 20th and first two decades of the 21st centuries possesses. But then again, one might argue that if it weren't for the fantasies, Tolkien might have been known best as a good translator of the "Pearl" poems of the late Middle English period. Those are something worth reading, I should note.
Je suis méchant.
