The LotR films seemed to be a labor of love. There were all sorts of documentaries about the efforts taken with the props and scenery, how craftsmen made all the armor for the orc extras and so on. They used a lot more practical effects, while the Hobbit trilogy relied a lot more on green screens & CGI. Where the LotR used forced perspective and scaled-up props to make the hobbits seem smaller than the human-sized characters like Gandalf, in T&BA, they just put McKellan in a green-screen room, full of green furniture shapes and told him to pretend he was at a dinner party. While that in and of itself is not to blame for the decline in quality, it is indicative of the relative lack of effort and reliance on shortcuts in the production of the second trilogy. In the first movie alone, there were three different scenes where the characters were on a precariously swaying objects at a great height (cliffs during the giant fight, scaffold in Goblintown and pine trees during the warg attack). There were also a lot more people in the group, but fewer real characters. LotR trimmed stuff that was superfluous to the important parts of the plot, like Tom Bombadil and the barrow-wights, while the Hobbit looked for padding to stretch the plots, like expanding on the fall of the mayor of Laketown, which was about two sentences in the books. Ironically, I am thinking of Bilbo's commentary on his unnaturally-extended lifespan, courtesy of the Ring, where he said he felt like too little butter spread over too much bread. That was The Hobbit trilogy - too little material, spread over too many movies. And a group of a dozen interchangeable people just looks silly trying to do action scenes. I noticed something similar in a movie that featured Christ's 12 Apostles sneaking past Roman soldiers. That's too many people for a proper group action scene. Even the 9-man Fellowship had Aragorn, Boromir, Gimli & Legolas doing most of the action while the hobbits cowered in the back. But we also had clearer ideas about who they were, while no one could differentiate any dwarves other than Thorin, Balin, Dwalin and Fili & Kili. Dwalin had hardly any characterization, but he had a distinctive look and was the second one we met, while Fili & Kili were pretty interchangeable, even with the stupid Elf romance thrown in. This made the rest of the cast effectively dead-weight, an it showed, IMO.