The only thing Elves ever seem to trade is booze, lumber, cloth and dead animals. Sometimes those crappy wooden sticks they call weapons.
Usually I give them a messload of goblin crap I just want taken off my map in exchange for whatever is useful and they come back with 2 dozen donkeys and 500 tons of wood next year.
I don't know why everyone hates elves. Cheap booze, cloth and wood and animal corpses. Not as helpful as the humans with their insane variety of boozes and food to keep your weird dwarves happy, but helpful enough. If you trade well with them they come back with tons of the same shit you bought from them last time. They bring almost as much wood as the humans do.
Anyways, yeah, D&D does have a weird thing about half-elves, half-orcs, half dwarves and half-everything under the sun. I guess there is that either that percentage of the market base that can't commit to the weird archtypes of a fantasy race, but doesn't want to play a plain ol' boring human, or the types that gotta imagine crazy sex with non-exisitant fantasy races or something like that.
I'm sure elves get drunk, there are plenty of drunks staggering around in the woods in their forest retreats. They are kinda like rainbow people or whatever, I guess.