I was going to post that video as I just came across it on Youtube. It's definitely sad what became of the Hobbit as a film.
Honestly, I think the idea that the original LOTR movies need to be remade because of the long list of nitpicks above is pretty bunk. We simply cannot expect a film series to be meticulously faithful to a book series. I get that this is a Tolkien fan forum but we can't have our cake and eat it too. Most fantasy films, and films in general to be honest, are rubbish. There has never before or since been a fantasy epic which received LOTR's level of care, love, financial input, polish and still managed to be largely faithful to the source material while becoming a cultural phenomenon.
Philip Pullman's
His Dark Materials series, for example, had the
Mulefa, a fantastical race of elephant-like creatures, cut out in the stage version and characters accordingly deleted. It still received good reviews, as far as I'm aware. Imagine how bad the LOTR films could have been with half the budget, half the run time and nobody who really understood the source material?
I think adaptations have to be faithful to the
spirit of the source material, not the detail. This video, which includes a discussion of the LOTR movies, has shaped my opinion here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek2O6bVAIQQ
What is the spirit of the LOTR series? Basically, it's about small, brave, humble people triumphing over large, important, arrogant, powerful people. It's about pity and mercy, with violence as a last resort. And it's about having an adventure in a world which feels enormous.
This is why I feel the extended cuts of the LOTR trilogy are detrimental to the trilogy's experience. There are several moments in the extended edition which justify violence and fetishise it, much more than in the theatrical release. Think of Aragorn decapitating the Mouth of Sauron, who hadn't lifted a hand to attack him. Think of how Saruman dies like a comic book character, falling on to a spike. There is also an exchange between Gimli and Legolas where they talk about their kill counts after Helm's Deep. Rightly, these scenes were cut.
This sort of stuff is still there in the release (Legolas's exploits at surfing and Muma-killing particularly annoy me) but overall I think the spirit I mentioned above is pretty well preserved. The lines which stick with us from LOTR are Gandalf's "pity is what stayed Bilbo's hand", Sam's "I can carry you", and Theoden's sacrificial speech at Pelennor. We have the Hobbits, who, although they have to be sidelined sometimes by the epic stuff for the sake of cinema, are still central to the plot. We have quiet, serious moments and an ending emphasis on homecoming (I have come to terms with the fact that the Scouring of the Shire had to be cut - you can't have a second sub-climax in a nine hour epic). Basically, the spirit is retained.
The Hobbit movies, needless to say, were trash, because they didn't have any of the spirit of either book. Strangely, despite their long running time, the world of The Hobbit felt smaller after watching those movies. Once you see too much of a world, it starts having to repeat itself and the magic is broken. And the tone of the series is completely off. It doesn't know if it wants to be an epic, an adventure tale, a light-hearted comedy, or musing on greed. It doesn't know which characters are important. It's a mish-mash of rubbish. Let's just forget it happened.