Hee hee... so sadly true. It seems strange to be able to say that one loves fantasy (and I really do) and at the same time to blanch at the thought of reading anything in the genre on account of the nigh-certainty that it will turn out to be 1200 pages of badly-written pseudo-plagiarism. :(

*bow* I know what you mean. The worst of it is I feel so let down by authors I previously loved suddenly stopping writing, y'know, *books* I'm building up to another article on this subject.

Truth be told, I would have probably drifted away from the genre if it wasn't for stuff like the Fantasy Masterworks series providing handy signpost for what's hot and what's not. I think it's very telling that out of the 50 books they've published pretty much none of them involve epic series of half a dozen 1000 page books. Length isn't always a guarantee of mediocrity but I'm pretty sure brevity is a sign of good taste these days.

Just ran across this story and found it incredibly cute, and thought it might fit here somehow:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayner_Unwin