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They just sort of left in a hurry, without asking permission. And then they wouldn't come back... saying they shouldn't have been there is silly, because there were always Elves in Middle-Earth.

I was uncertain about whether they (Elves) were supposed to be in ME. It's my understanding that the ones who didn't move to Valinor eventually became...orc-material. Or at least some of the Avari were. Do we have any stories about "non-orc precursor" Avari?

No... well, the unfortunate orc-material Elves were captured long before there were any divisions of Elfkind. Later there were a whole bunch of splits (almost as bad as a denomination!) but there were two main splits - into Moriquendi and Calaquendi - Elves of the Dark and Elves of the Light. The Moriquendi include the Avari (Unwilling, those who completely refused to go to Valinor) and the Umanyar(very rarely used grouping, means they started off but never got there. Most of these were originally Teleri, but now Teleri refers to one of the three branches of the Eldar.

The Calaquendi, or Eldar, are broken into the Vanyar (Fair Elves, sometimes Light Elves), the Noldor ("Deep Elves", our good friends), and the Teleri (Sea-Elves).

Got it? There will be a quiz... as long as I'm throwing out Elf-names, Eldar means People of the Stars, and refers only to the Elves of the Journey. So Thingol could be considered an Eldar, and he's granted Calaquendi status because he went to Valinor once, but he rules Sindar, which are Teleri/Umanyar/Moriquendi.

I think we just ran into "too many names" syndrome again.