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Notes -
This is my thought as well.
The LotR appendices were, shockingly, not TV ready. A team applied them to what is by all accounts a fairly standard plot. Much budget was spent on CG and costuming. Casting was more diverse than Peter Jackson’s oeuvre, presumably in an attempt to hit a slightly broader audience.
All pretty vanilla decisions, but because of the brush with diversity, critics have a nice scapegoat.
If they'd spent less money on terrible wargs and more on finding somebody who knew how to write scripts for TV that involved credible dialogue, there would be less to complain about. Their inexperience is not helping them; if they had enough successes under their belt then they could pull off selling the woke stuff. But since their major idea of filling in the gaps in the Second Age seems to be "We have 1 black dwarf and 1 black elf, yay diverse representation!!!!" - no, it's not working.
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