I think these films deliberately are sillier and more childish, more fantastical looking than LOTR due to the tone of the book. I think it works IMO, on an entertainment level absolutely but not necessarily on an artistic level.
During the first two Hobbbit movies, I remember like 20 minutes of material that made me think it could be a movie about book Hobbit. I'm not some Tolkien purist/fan and don't exactly mind much if Jackson goes against the book. I don't like watching Hobbit movies mainly because I like watching good movies where action scenes don't feel like plastic people music videos or video game cutscenes.
Challenge: try not to nod along to this recent interview with Viggo Mortensen
“Anybody who says they knew it was going to be the success it was, I don’t think it’s really true,” he says. “They didn’t have an inkling until they showed 20 minutes in Cannes, in May of 2001. They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video.”
Mortensen thinks – rightly – that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing, we were going at such a pace, and they had so many units shooting, it was really insane. But it’s true that the first script was better organised,” he says. “Also, Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.
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I'm not looking forward to her tears in the next movie. Although I expect she's going to die as an excuse for her absence in LOTR and to motivate Legolas (I hope not, because chicks dying just to add emotional depth to a male character is enough of a trope) 
