More Words, Deeper Hole

Does the idea that Moorcock felt sword and sorcery was full of hacks and so wrote Elric etc actually work with the dates? Elric began circa 1961. Exactly what masses of hack sword and sorcery were flooding the market at that point, especially at novel length? In the 50s-60s Vance, Lieber, Anderson, etc. - all pretty good stuff, all of it mostly trying new directions. (Okay, a few terrible duds as well. Glory Road...)

I suppose it's possible the pages of magazine SF/F were full of deservedly forgotten horrors, but otherwise I'd peg the flood of hack swords and sorcery as mostly starting in the late 1960s as the Tolkien and Conan booms both began to take off, 7-9 years after Moorcock started his series.

Moorcock was not especially impressed by a lot of the competition, but I think he was interested in just making his story different in the way that every other good writer was different: Lieber told urban stories with an ironic edge, Vance used magicians as his protagonists and polished his language, Anderson used historical settings and made religion important, and so on. You got some conan pastiches later on.