Now, may I offer another point you haven't mentioned? I don't find The Hobbit at all disappointing, I love it, and appreciate it all the more became it seems to me that it was a project beset with problems from the outset - probably more than we'll ever know about. No one who was on the forum in the early days of the production is likely to forget all the upheavals - the legal wrangling, the green light that never came, the union dispute and talk of moving the production elsewhere in the world, Guillermo del Toro leaving, actors who were cast and then left, or looked unlikely to be cast because as time went by they had taken other parts. Watching from the outside it was almost unbearable at times; for those involved it must have been a nightmare. It seemed at times that because this was a very big film attracting a lot of attention everyone with a grudge wanted to target it to get their case heard. Then there was Peter Jackson's illness at the last moment, which set them back again. I honestly believe that this is where all the trouble lay. If only Peter Jackson and his team had been directing from the outset and had been able to shape the story in their own way I think things would have been different. If they had decided on a trilogy and had the green light to go ahead quickly, with all the time that they needed and no looming uncertainty. It may be that the end product wouldn't have been very different - I don't have the problems with it that you seem to - but it would have escaped the perception of being a ship constantly lurching towards the rocks that has dogged it from the start. In this world image is everything, and from the early days these films had the image of impending disaster - people even talked about them being cursed. In the curcumstances I'm amazed that they pulled it off so well, and I suspect that in time people will see that and have the same affection for The Hobbit, warts and all, as they do for LotR.

3) The Hobbit novel is only so slender because it covers a lot of ground with, in many places, very few words and doesn’t develop most of its characters. That works fine in the book but is very different from LotR. So I think that just filming The Hobbit at the same level of detail as LotR would take more than one movie. As well, a movie that would match LotR in breadth and scope had to expand, had to bring in the White Council story, give us more story about Thorin and Bard and Thranduil and develop more of the characters than the book did. There were a myriad of ways the film makers could have done all this and what we see on the screen in how they chose to go. Some of us like their choices, some don’t.

4) Yes they brought in characters, some invented, for specific story purposes or to provide insight into the characters of Thranduil, Legolas, Bard, the Master etc. Fo me thatwas necesary. IMO Legolas needed to be there since he is Thranduil’s son and again IMO, a cameo would not really have worked once we started getting into the politics and society of the Elven realm.