[obloquy]

In addition to the racial angle you've proposed, the incidental, indirect nature of Beren and Luthien's recovery of the Sils perhaps place them outside of the patterns of fate woven around the Noldor and the Silmarils. Their accomplishment was a byproduct of the discharge of "higher" duties, such as the duty of love and its requisite sacrifices, and the binding nature of faithful oaths, rather than any desire for the gems themselves. One might say (and perhaps Tolkien would have agreed) that in a world doomed to perpetual decline, the only possibility of catching a glimpse or a direct experience of the Golden Age would be not to attempt to recapture it, but to come by its light indirectly through participation of the transcendental. Attempts to concretely possess it in a material sense are doomed from the beginning.

(This is badly written. Understand that when I used the word "transcendental" I didn't mean to invoke something vague and mystical; I meant it much more like the "extraordinary" in Chesterton's famous maxim about the extraordinariness of the ordinary family.)