This is what is wrong with the Alice in Wonderland Tarot and the LOTR Tarot - They end up using minor, minor forgettable characters to fill up the deck, some not part of the story.
I agree with you that they, and a few others like them, feel forced, but there isn't another alternative. When Waite and Crowley created their decks, they used esoteric influences from a myriad of different sources, but any literary adaptation would have merely one main source. That could be enough for something as unambitious as the Wonderland deck, but as you said, it doesn't work (Not to be confused with the unreleased Alice Tarot from Baba Studios which looks really cool, although not for me because of the photo-realism).
I think the problem lies in the difference between a creator falling in love with story's symbolism and then making a deck, between another who creates it for the same reasons the plethora of prequels, sequels, remakes and reboots that are being made. Take a popular name, do something banal with it, add some gratuitous CGI, and you've got a blockbuster.
That being said, as I said, I would love a Tolkein deck that used sources from all the books, including LOTR and the Hobbit, Unfinished Tales, the Silmarillion, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and a few others. There is certainly no lack for material there. Something like that could still be amazing, even if it stuck to the RWS formula. The drawback would be that few would buy such a thing, and even fewer would understand it. Personally I would be amazed, but only because I spent a few years reading nothing but Tolkein. A "true" Tolkein deck also needn't follow the same "character a card" formula, since it is such a rich world, it practically has its own esoterics in it. But again, how geeky can one be when trying to appeal to the mass market?
Unfortunately, most literary adaptations of decks are made by the second type I mentioned, they aren't created to be good. This could also be a commentary that the "great" decks such as the RWS were made to appeal to practically everyone, while many today are made for niche markets, and those don't sell as much.
