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See, I don't judge Tolkien's works so much in terms of oldness or newness/freshness as in terms of momentum... I find the period up to and directly after the publication of LotR so effective because he still had this momentum, but it was tempered with a certain maturity of style that isn't quite as present in the wild-eyed original.
Of course, one can argue (and probably rightly) that part of why Tolkien lost his momentum was because once he had written something down, it was committed. That became even worse once something was published, because then it was canon--and we can see Tolkien trying to struggle around this both in the manner in which he explained away the differences between the two versions of "Riddles in the Dark" and in the way that he still tried to make changes to Quenya after LotR, but was ultimately very hampered in doing so. That's got to be reflective of life in some way, but I'm blessed if I can think of how.
But, yes, it's best in this case that we have both versions!
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