JRRT's will essentially gave CJRT the right to do whatever he wanted with the unpublished material; he could:
Quote:
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publish edit alter rewrite or complete any work of mine which may be unpublished at my death or to destroy the whole or any part or parts of any such unpublished works as he in his absolute discretion may think fit and subject thereto
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(Source:
http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2009/12/tolkiens-will.html)
Based on that I don't think we've much choice but to accept the published Silmarillion as being anything other than in accordance with JRRT's wishes, which distils the debate down to whether or not it's what JRRT would have done had he lived.
I personally don't think that JRRT would have ever completed the Silmarillion. He'd become too distracted by cosmological and philosophical matters, and his apparent preferred direction would - IMO have destroyed the myth of the Trees. I think CJRT made the right decisions here.
I'm not sure if I'm in a minority or if this is a controversial statement, but I also hugely approve of what CJRT did with the Ruin of Doriath. The image of Thingol's death is one of the most abiding (and saddest) memories from my first reading, and I even think JRRT would have given it the nod as "what really happened" (and no doubt niggled endlessly over some of the finer points).
In the end I view the published Silmarillion as being in the legendary world what it also is in the real world - a compilation of divergent material from different sources, some historical, some mythical, but not all necessarily accurate. View it as a way of saying "according to one version of the mythology this is what happened, but there are other versions and they may or may not say different". In the end it is mostly dealing with a mythical age, preserved in various traditions but mostly recorded later and filtered through poor understanding and whatever scraps survived the various Disasters. It's as if there were 12 Homers each of who wrote their own Iliad, then a later author assembles them into an account which is neither wholly accurate to the 12 sources nor reflective of an actual historical Trojan War.
I think that view is actually quite representative of JRRT's own, and may be one reason why CJRT is happy to let the published work stand, even if dissatisfied with much of what he did in constructing it.