Interesting topic! Just to correct one point, though:
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Originally Posted by Nogrod
But when he was writing the Silm he realised that he could not keep up with that allegory of evil as such as there was Melkor and all that "actual history" there making Sauron more like a minion himself than the Real Thing. So he had to write Sauron as a personality that fitted the overall history and took his place there?
Or whatever the order of these writings are...
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It was actually closer to the other way around. The cunning 'deceiver' Sauron of the Silmarillion is pretty well established in the pre-LotR writings. The first version of the 'Lay of Leithien', written between 1925 and 1931, is, I would say, the first place where Sauron as we know him in the Silmarillion is clearly portrayed.
So if anything, we have Tolkien moving from a vividly characterized villain to a faceless one, rather than the other way around. However, it's worth noting that in the post-LotR material, particularly the extensive revisions to the 'Lay of the Leithien', 'deceiver' Sauron is retained; in other words, post-LotR Sauron is more like pre-LotR Sauron than he is like LotR Sauron.
Given this, I think the differences between his portrayal in LotR and the Silmarillion have more to do with his roles in the respective works than with any re-thinking of the character by Tolkien.