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...what is essential to The Lord of the Rings?
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I think it is mistaken to force your fundamental question,
Formendacil, into a discussion about the movies versus the books.
The movies are an altogether different art form, so to posit the question in terms of a comparison to the books is like comparing, not apples to oranges, but, say, castles to ocean liners.
Your original comparison to Shannara would be more like comparing an actual castle to an amusement park version of a castle.
It seems to me to be a bedevilment to try to compare LotR to alternative versions of itself. What if Pippin had died at Moria instead of Gandalf? (To borrow from a Tolkien letter...) what if Gollum had experienced remorse and tried to battle his addiction to the Ring? What if Boromir had taken the Ring from Frodo, been killed by the orcs who found it, who then brought it to Saruman? What if Sam had lost the rope and he and Frodo would have been stuck up in the Emyn Muil many more days, rendering them too late to avoid the muster of Mordor?
Would any of these alternatives have rendered the story
not LotR? Yes, most likely, but could Tolkien have written a believable rendition anyway? Who can say?
I guess, what I'm coming to, is that I don't see plot as the essential thing about LotR. It's somewhere else. Tone? What does that mean?