Joe Hutch
Mate of the bloke
I'm not a fan of the fantasy genre, on the whole (and, like Joe, just can't stomach LoTR), but the little I've read does sometimes let us hold a mirror up to ourselves and see our society from a different POV; at least I think it does, and that's certainly the case for the (small amount of) stuff I've read, especially HDM. So I think it has value and merit in that regard. In much the same way, good SciFi is not only imaginative in a 'what if..?' sort of way, but can also give us insights into our own society, or its possible direction of travel perhaps.
Part of the problem for me is that I read shedloads of sci-fi in my early-mid teens and if I try to read it now, it feels like a genre I've grown out of. I thought it was mildly ridiculous when people on my MA course raved on about Harry Potter. It's like I was still raving on about the Jennings books in my early 20s. (They are jolly good, though).