As an aside, when I ran it we didn’t have much problem coming up with a player directed plot-line for the 7 session mini-campaign we ran, but a lot of the reason for that was I was able to interpret what people were asking for in Middle Earth terms.  I”ve been living an breathing Middle Earth since I was like 10 years old.  So when we sat down to create characters and people started talking about the sorts of things they were interested in, I was able to link those things up to bits of Middle Earth lore, feed it back to them, and jointly arrive at cool group of characters with some connections to each other, a strong goal/motivation for the group of characters to be together at game start, and a clear picture of the threats/obstacles/opportunities facing them.

If Middle Earth is not your “native land”, I’m not sure how that would work.