Aw, it wasn't meant to be shade! Just the best assessment I could make.

They are definitely comparable in the sense that they are both creators of categories.

Edit: Tolkien is also dead.

In general, I don't think creativity equates to book sales, so an argument about creative level can't be countered with "X sold more copies than Y."

Problem is, there is no way to compare creativity between the founders of 2 different genres. Is Tolkien more creative than Allan Poe? That would be a very pretentious question.

I am not sure why the grand OP claim that Jin Yong's work are retelling of history. It uses history as its background, but one of his most important contributions is to create Jiang Hu(江湖), a society that is beyond the realm of moral governmental, that is Chao Ting(朝廷), which usually represents the account of history.

I think nowadays kung fu/shaolin have gained more widespread social awareness, as well as (lord help me) Dragonball Z, so saying "The 18 palms Dragon form", or "18 fists of the Golden Dragon" won't get the same kind of cringe factor compared to maybe 20-30 years ago.

Now ninjas, on the other hand... how can japanese audiences watch anything to do with ninjas in hollywood, and not throw up straightaway?

Just my opinion, but I think the elements of culture and language play no small roles in such kind of translation. My country (Vietnam) is heavily influenced by Chinese, and even that if you use normal vocabularies for literal translation like "18 palms of the Golden Dragon", it still sounds super corny, yet switching to Sino-Vietnamese style automatically makes it 10 times more awesome and elegant. And this expands to other subjective points such as characters, thematic plots, etc...; thus I feel it probably is way harder for Western audience to agree with the comparison with Tolkien.

Are hollywood-ninjas worst than anime-ninjas?