Welcome back Kin-Strife, hope to see you around more often.
I think the crucial point of the topic is the speculative missing link between the Legendarium as we have it and the old Silmarillion myths which Tolkien had invented long before even The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings turned out to be just that, greatly centered on hobbits and men, and yet having the lofty air of the legends of the Elder Days as history, and as living proofs in the Elves.
Without The Lord of the Rings then, I would still assume the Legendarium would have taken a turn towards Men in the process of further development. In a way, a story as that of the Ring War was a logical consequence of Tolkien's writings on Middle-Earth up to The Lord of the Rings, with the exception of The Hobbit. He had more or less hesitatingly discarded the ideas of a historic or Germanic layer behind the Legendarium (as was envisioned in Ælfwine and in The Lost Road), but not the interest in focussing on the Men of Middle-Earth more.
For me, an important question would be, why link the Silmarillion mythology with hobbits?
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