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Murphy's_Law
Well, I beg to differ ... and I don't work in software engineering. :)
The Hobbit is a charming little book with aspects of which Tolkien was unhappy until the end, although he had grown somewhat reconciled to its imperfections. When he came to conceive The Lord of the Rings, he changed a key aspect of the Hobbit quite radically and revised it multiple times, which greatly improved it, so you have the LotR to thank for that.
The LotR is a literary masterpiece, one of the best books of the 20th century. I have never met anyone who supposedly appreciated it as a 'hormonal teenager' who had understood it (and it's not obscure at all, but requires just that little more careful reading than some people are prepared to give it), so it may well be true that people persisting in their youthful views are in arrested development. The dreadful Peter Jackson films are a case in point. (I say 'films' even though I only managed the first one, as I read quite a lot about some of the other distortions and manglings, right down to messing up the book's pivotal scene.) Likewise for the broken reflections of it in pretty much anything from fantasy role-playing to science fiction.
The Silmarillion is an unfinished collection of fragments that Tolkien tried to shape into some halfway acceptable literary format, but his failing strength in his later years meant he was unable to. After doing a less-than-satisfactory editing job on it in the 1970s, Christopher Tolkien has more recently done a much better one, particularly on The Children of Húrin, which, while still unfinished, has more integrity than in the poorly sketched-out Silmarillion version and has a dramatic intensity almost on a par with the LotR. Despite all the problems with getting the Silmarillion together and with its style, the material of the stories is utterly superb, and of course the depth of Tolkien's mythology, and his development of it, goes much deeper than that--witness the History of Middle-earth series and his copious linguistic writings. There are many keys to understanding and appreciating his invention--the languages, the names, his work on fairy-tales, and his fervent striving for consistency in ideas that he first developed when reconvalescing from wartime injury--and I can completely understand why people give up and dismiss it, but it is extremely rewarding to persist.