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Tolkien and/or anything Tolkien-esque in nature is too often used as the standard by which all fantasy is measured which I find short sighted.

In general I find "traditional" or "conventional" AKA "high" fantasy to be a bit underwhelming and particularly dull. It’s not that anything is inherently wrong with this style of fantasy it is just that I have found from personal experience and observation that High fantasy "purists" tend to consider other style of fantasy disagreeable and are quiet verbal about their discontent.

I have also found that high fantast purists tend to automatically assume that the genre of fantasy equals "High Fantasy", which is simply not the case anymore. Fantasy as a whole started before Tolkien as a retelling and/or incorporation of traditional folklore/myths in to fictional works. Tolkien helped bring Fantasy into the main stream and helped establish the Fantasy genre as a legitimate form of writing but he was by no means the first fantasy author and is certainly not the best.

Actually the legend goes that Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were talking about various stories and legends one day when they decided to take their writing in a new direction. They came up with the topics of "Time" and "Space" and decided to write books related to those themes. According to legend they flipped a coin and Lewis got Space and Tolkien got Time. Time turned into Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and Space turned in to Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" with The Lord of the Rings coming from the Hobbit and the Chronicles of Narnia coming from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Of course the hobbit was originally released in 1937 and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was released in 1950 so the time discrepancy makes this legend unlikely.

However, it does show that even when Traditional high Fantasy was being solidified into a genre that a slightly different take on fantasy was also being developed. If even only based on the fact that Tolkien and Lewis were friends and common associates.

I started off as a Horror and Sci-Fi fan and only switched to Fantasy because of Dark and Gothic Fantasy which typically has none of the traditional races. I feel like variant races outside of the traditional races opens up a lot of different options but no matter what you do with the traditional races they tend to get type casted and adventures tend to run a long a select few options. It is in many ways stifling to creativity and originality. (I speak in general terms as there is always exception to the rule).

There is nothing wrong with Mr. Gygax taking high fantasy and using it as the foundation of his Role Playing Game. It was so well done that it became the foundation of most RPGs. That does not mean that fantasy RPGs have to follow the same principles/genres/assumptions he used in developing his original D&D.

The thing that I like about Golarion and Pathfinder in general is that it offers so many different things that I can play pretty much any type of Fantasy setting that I want (outside of no official psionic rules but that is a different discussion). Paizo never claimed that Golarion or Pathfinder as a whole was a traditional high fantasy game. Only that it was a fantasy game.

I enjoy sitting at a table with no elf prince rangers but then I also suspect that there are several table of elf prince rangers, and dwarven high born paladins who are glad that my Tiefling Blight Druid is nowhere to be found....and that's fine, everything has its place. My place is not at the table of tradition high fantasy purest players.

I personally find "High Fantasy" which a lot of people call "conventional Fantasy" or "Traditional Fantasy" to be very boring and uninspiring. I have several friends who are high fantasy purest and even though we play fantasy RPGs together we have learned that certain topics are off topics or they lead to fights.

I also don't roll my eyes every time they make an elf prince ranger and they refrain from doing the same when I make a character inspired by something darker. I started off as a horror and Sci-Fi fan and then slowly turned to Fantasy. My first RPG experiences took place in a sci-fi universe with guns and psychic powers and all sorts of yummy things like that.

I respect Tolkien for what he did to advance the genre of fantasy but I hate how many people consider him the measure by which all other things fantasy are judged to have value by.

I like the inner sea setting because it isn't solid traditional high fantasy. There are a lot of other genres sprinkled and mixed together. I think this is a great thing but I don't expect everyone to share that opinion.

I like the idea of slumbering old gods who are twisted and would destroy the world should they wake. I like the idea of flying cities and structures. I like the idea of a nation run by undead. I like the idea of Psionics. I like the idea of anti-heroes who really want to stop a BBEG but find it more convenient and assured to work by approaching a scorched earth approach. Whoever survives will be better off in the long run and can live their life without fear of the BBEG making them slaves/experiments/undead/whatever.

My main complaint about threads like this is that Paizo never claimed that Golarion was a high fantasy setting. The people who complain most often about the setting are from what I have seen are usually "High Fantasy" purest even if they don't identify as such. These purest have a very strict idea of what a "fantasy setting" is going to look like and become upset when it does not look like that. As someone who started with horror and sci-fi then only started liking fantasy because of gothic and dark fantasy I can say that the wide selection of things in the inner sea tickle my fancy a bit and have made me invest. (I also have been known to read alternative history fantasy so the pretty much direct references to real life history in the Inner Sea setting doesn't even make me blink an eye).

I'm not saying that being a high fantasy purest limits creativity or makes an individual unoriginal when designing their own game but it certainly cuts out a lot of potentially cool things as they don't fit the genre.

I think the biggest problem that Paizo is having is that they only offer and support one official setting. People have an aversion to using third party material in general and a lot of people do not like non-high fantasy. It means you have a lot of people with a narrow view of fantasy finding fault in a lot of what Golarion has to offer. I would encourage these people to explore some of the third party campaign settings. Many of them have very traditional feels.

Also I would argue that Golarion as a whole has a slight dark fantasy theme to all things which is why so much of Pathfinder material is a bit mature in its nature. However, this results in even more complaints as high fantasy tends to be a bit PG or PG-13, where as dark fantasy and gothic fantasy can delve pretty far into the NC-17 area.