I'm reading: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098QHZBY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 "Writing 21st Century Fiction" by Donald Maass If I'm getting his point correctly, he seems to think that most of the books lasting the longest on the NYT Best Sellers list are literary fiction with great stories. Craft and story with personal emotions and genre conventions as tools not rules are the way to go if you want universal appeal. So... do it all.
Yes, it is. I feel like any other genre can be “literary.” Detective stories, SF, Fantasy, Horror. Depends on the story.
I feel like it's probably harder to sell a literary version of a genre to a genre market and vice versa. That's been my personal experience. So I don't really see why you would really want to do that, unless, of course, that's really what they want to do. But literary is not a substitute for the word good which so many people seem to misunderstand. It's a different kind of story. It's told a different way. It has different kinds of outcomes. Really, the marriage between genre and literary is quite hard to achieve.
Before I started to read/write serously I never really cared about the style of the prose as long as it wasn’t actively bad. Exessive reppition, lack of vocabulary, saying “I” or “she every single sentence. There is a difference between tight prose and sloppy/cut writing. I tend towards sci fi books for solid outline based plots, and fantasy for more free flowing stories. Giving large portions of my time to writing has made me more aware of how people write.