My basic attitude is that "The Hobbit" trilogy was kind of a mess, and didn't need to be split into three movies. Also Peter Jackson learned how to use dwarves in a fight scene far too late in his career to really redeem himself, since he turned Gimli into a joke in "Lord Of The Rings" and largely had the dwarves bumbling around through the first two Hobbit movies, where yes they are defeated in most of those places, but in the cases where there was a decent fight scene they had Legolas coming into do the action when the dwarves should have been doing their own fighting and establishing their credentials more before the third movie which is really the only place where they seemed remotely competent.
Legolas being present mostly annoyed me because he seemed to have been inserted so the director could have action scenes before he really got his head around the concept of the dwarven warrior properly, after all Legolas handled most of the fighting during the whole second movie alongside his newly created love interest. That said there was no real reason NOT to have him in the third movie because he is after all the prince of the wood elves and pretty much immortal. Had Tolkien written things in a different order himself he might have given Legolas a bigger role in The Hobbit. That said a few scenes of him kicking butt alongside the elves would have been sufficient.
The whole battle between The White Council and The Necromancer in Mirkwood was actually mentioned, as well as how there were some alarming events, Tolkien wasn't big on action, and hadn't formed his entire later plot though so it was neither well described or that meaningful. As a way of padding out the movie and tying it to the LoTR trilogy if wasn't badly done. It also helps drive home how Saruman's betrayal was such a huge, and surprising, blow.
To be honest one thing I did like about the trilogy is I can now both better visualize hobbit rock throwing advantage and what it might look like to see a dwarf riding a goat up a mountain. These were mentioned, and part of PnP RPG lore for a long time, but always somehow raised an eyebrow. Even after Warcraft where I rode goats I still had trouble envisioning staying on one while it was jumping around on rocks.... it was at least shown convincingly for pure fantasy. I believe there was at one point an entire Halfling kit or subclass based around rock throwing that could do obnoxious damage, and I'm still not quite buying that one, at least someone had the audacity to actually show a hobbit killing orcs by pitching stones. In one edition of AD&D (it was probably second) there was a way for a Halfling to throw rocks with the same RoF as darts (4 per action) and they could gain strength damage bonuses for thrown weapons and dex advantages, and then something like a racial and class/kit based bonus of like +10 damage when you started adding in modifiers for specializations, attributes, etc... meaning that you'd have a hobbit rapidly getting to the point where anything without a deeply negative AC was a guaranteed strike and a minimum damage output of 88 points of damage per round (8 attacks for dual wielding thrown stones, 4 RoF with each hand, minimum damage roll of 1 +10 damage. if all 8 attacks hit that's 88 damage). Given that a beefy dragon might have 128 hit points by the same rules this would nearly kill it, and smaller ones would be obliterated. For Smaug all you'd need is to have the Hobbiton pebble pitching league stop by to use him for target practice.... a good 20 members show up and he's dead, and threatening armies would go down quicker than someone inventing the Uzi... but I'm rambling, nobody cares about ancient munchkin AD&D tales. The point is mostly I thought it was cool because I still remember as a DM having to veto character builds where people wanted to drop a bunch of orcs in a round or two with nothing but thrown rocks and could justify it by the books.
