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He disdained stooping to irony: he wrote heroic characters like Faramir and Aragorn along the lines of ancient saga and didn't give a damn about "character arcs" or whether a contemporary audience could "identify" with them. And plainly it worked, given the books' overwhelming success: success *without* compromise.
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He was writing for an entirely different generation. Ours is one that expects action and character development and people they can identify with. The movie is meant to appeal to them, therefore it includes these things.
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Stuff and nonsense. The English literary world of the time was dominated by the likes of Leavis and Muir and Waugh, who expected all of the above (and castigated Tolkien for defiantly refusing to play ball). Again, intentionally 'appealing' to what an audience 'expects' (especially an audience which, if you are correct, is effectively Neanderthal in its expectations), is pandering and the antithesis of Tolkien's art. His mission, insofar as he saw it, was to reintroduce modern readers to something they had lost or forgotten, the glories of older literature before the rise of the bourgeois novel.
I regret that similar pandering apparently underlies the Zemeckis Beowulf, which from the trailers looks gawdawful- but I'm sure the same audiences whioo flocked to Conan the Barbarian and PJ's flicks will eat it up.