Deconstructing Tropes in Several Genres
Thought - punk and so Iikely unpopular thought - I think you're right about not being able to get a satisfying experience from repeating shallow tropes, but I don't think grinding what you have down and setting it out in piles, so to speak, will help you get what you need.
It's the downside of fanboyism, which is good for making friends - I say I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition, you tell me no-one does, we later cheerfully argue about the weight of a balrog and thus know we're round about the same wavelength - but conservative in its trends and so creatively infertile, because if you've got to do the same things the same way to hang with the male nerd elite there's only so much depth you can put in. I think we need to take a page from fangirlism - not the creepy pages that bring in Romance tropes and fetishise male-male relationships, but the transformative aspects - the "I love the thing, how do we make more thing?".
...which is usually by knowing why your favoured tropes work, but applying them beyond people or areas that've traditionally had the spotlight and following through. e.g. You (IC) say no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition, my NPC makes to speak but is interrupted by a bunch of the Inquisatorial Resistance's Jewish pirates bursting through the door and saying "WE DID!!" ...and so you have a renewal of the unexpected-funny of the original skit (the pirates can search the room thoroughly, declaring their presence on opening every cupboard if you like to do a bit) . You also have pirates (for an example of things I like) and the engaging joy of discovery as they're a bit different from your standard Bristolian salty mariner and if your GM is getting inspired by their research as said pirates carry off party and plot, your game will get kicked up a notch.
It's basically what Tolkien did, and why it's a tragedy people shallow-copying his stuff has left the Prof holding the buck for degraded copies of his work (e.g. "orcs bad" rather than "the souls stolen by Morgoth at the start of the world and deformed by torture desire to pass on their pain as they cannot escape their cruelty-shaped flesh, harm passing through generations"...they're more like headcrab zombies in canon, where incomprehensible trauma is the parasite. That's...horrible on a far more existential level than "evil culture/creatures" which is all kinds of dumb for all kinds of reasons). I don't know how one would do it, but for horror and high fantasy at once, a Silmarillion game that knew the setting well but stayed away from the saga'd characters would be pretty amazing. Probably way too niche to get a full table, though.
I'm sure you could do things with more popular settings in the same vein...just pick the story not told a thousand times - that village/farm that always gets burned down in The Hero's tragic backstory? Play the survivors of that whose loved ones have run off to fight a dragon or some other dumb thing - do you go catch them? Rebuild? Join the hardships of a fantasy refugee camp looking for a home in a scorched land? Already that's doing more with the setting (if it is the setting you liked and wanted to explore, to feel the breeze and immerse in a land that never was) than whatever The Hero is up to, and following Refugee Mother Who Was Supposed To Burn Down doesn't even preclude a revenge plot if that's what one's into: it's less flashy, sure, and revenge might just be staying alive and getting enough nutrition to be able to bend a bow and practice sniping, but the grit is what'll make fantastic elements shine. Just reach in and commit; my thought is that you will get something with far more heart and memorable content than an intellectually abstracted then reconstructed narrative.