Aiwendil's comments:
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This is an interesting issue. Do the changes really not fit the mood of the rest of the book? I first read The Hobbit (or rather, had it read to me) about seventeen years ago. It was only a few years ago that I learned about the extensive changes that had been made to that chapter. Prior to learning about them, I never detected any discrepancy in tone.
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My earliest reading of the Hobbit was an old Houghton Mifflin first edition that I got from the library. Later on, I bought the revised Ballentine paperback even before I read LotR.
I was aware of a change in tone with the revisions. Since Riddles was a pivotal point in the story, I sensed there was something different going on. Plus, I knew that an author wouldn't go back and rewrite a book unless he had a serious reason for doing that (even if I didn't know what the reason was). Those changes cast a shadow over my reading of the story and lent a different tone than before. It wasn't as grim as LotR, but that chapter sounded more serious and less like a children's story.
Look at the critical phrase "my precious". I later read it again in Lord of the Rings. In the first edition, Gollum uses the word to describe himself. In the later revisions, "my precious" seems to refer to the Ring. Just a little change like that makes a difference. The Ring has become something more than a handy gadget to make someone invisible. Bilbo continues to use the Ring to get himself out of scrapes but you still can't help recalling the darker tones of the Riddles chapter.
It's not that the revisions were badly done. In fact they were done very skillfully. And if I had simply read the revisions without knowing about the original, I probably would not have been as aware of the discrepency in tone. But I did sense a difference between the unrevised and revised book even from a casual reading.
I also see a big difference between the Gandalf who is an artist in fireworks of the Hobbit and the early chapters of LotR, and the Gandalf who fought the Balrog in Moria. This was before the istar was transformed from grey to white. Perhaps it's too much to say there are two Gandalfs. There are points of connection and points of difference. But the points of difference are quite large, and I can't always fit the Gandalf of the Hobbit easily together with that of the Lord of the Rings (or for that matter the Necromancer with the later Sauron).
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P.S. About that cat who was the original "Sauron".....I think JRRT made a
big mistake in those revisions as well.
Tevildo, the lap cat of Melkor