I think too much of fantasy is endlessly rehashing Tolkien, generations later. I've got nothing against his work; he made up all kinds of memorable cultures based on old folklore. But instead of doing the same thing, fantasy stories now tend to copy-paste his work. So we get elves or dwarves or orcs who are "like Tolkien's except X". Even when somebody tries to be original with those races -- I'm thinking of "Warcraft"'s take on orcs -- they're still like Tolkien's orcs but X. I've started playing a game of asking, "how far down the list of player races on Pathfinder's SRD rules Web site do I have to look, to find all of this story's main characters?"

Nor is it simply a problem of species/race; it's also about culture. We're so comfortable with dwarves as male bearded Scandinavian grumpy miners that even their preferred weapons are well defined. The rehashed stereotypes limit the creativity of the stories including them. Would Tolkien have wanted everybody to keep recycling his ideas instead of inventing their own?

I would like griffins and centaurs, yeah -- or races of selkies or harpies or nagas or kitsune or the options I'm not even aware of from less obvious cultures! If we're using existing species, let's develop some of them into more interesting and detailed cultures so that in a generation, everybody knows tropes about harpy-people just as they know what your ISO Standard Elf is like.