Just a quick acknowledgment and thanks for all the positive rep for what was a very rushed post.
There are certainly numerous points in the films where you get the sense that Jackson just doesn't get Tolkien's point, where the story becomes for him so completely unintelligible, that all he can do is invent an alternative. I so wish the Hobbit movie would follow the book and build up to the BOFA, with the audience expecting another Pelenor Fields, only for the screen to go black when Bilbo is knocked unconscious and the viewer to see nothing of the battle at all. That would be being faithful to Tolkien. But it won't happen, obviously. We'll basically get rehash of PF, a 'glorious' epic battle, with eye popping effects (and probably some few pratfalls to lighten the mood), which will overwhelm and undermine Bilbo and Thorin's final farewell. Anyway, too rushed again - and typed on a phone ( I was tempted to leave in the 'eye pooping effects' that the predictive text threw up back there.....)