Bless you my son! Fighting the good fight.
As we have said, LOTR is far from perfect, and we can discuss the errors as long as you want to.
At the end of the day, Let's say that my "acceptable" rating for a movie like these deviating from the books, but enough is there for me to still pay to watch it, is 60%.
I would say that:
The Fellowship of the Ring scored a whopping 85%. Changes were acceptable, maybe even necessary.
Two Towers fell to 65% with some glaringly retarded changes.
Return of the King (just off hand, I haven't watched it in 10 years) got to maybe 75%. A few glaring deviations, a little too much hollywood, but basically OK.
The Hobbit*throws up a little*.......... rates around 13%.
This piece of crap could almost have changed the names of the characters and claimed to have invented a new fantasy altogether. (then we would be howling over the glaring 13% that they did rip off from the Hobbit) It should not even be in the same conversation with LOTR.
The latest debacle makes the LOTR look like JRR himself sat on set and arranged every scene.....while THE HOBBITlooks like a retarded mole rat with half a brain accidentally ripped 3 or 4 pages from the HOBBIT, ate them, and then puked them onto PJ's laptop where they somhow made it into 30,000 pages of script.