And even with that focus on the story, we get 12 hours in the extended editions, much of it expanding on the characters and their backstories as they relate to the world in which the story takes place.

It's hard to have pages and pages of explanation of a world in a movie. The movies do that by exploring that history in the set pieces and characters, and I think most people would agree they do a magnificent job of it.

Describing the world visually? I mean that kind of text is naturally going to disappear when you're creating a movie because all of that is just going to be represented in the cinematography.

John Scalzi shared a reasonably thoughtful perspective on this on his blog a few days ago: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/01/10/why-yes-in-fact-old-m...

"... although I will note ... that a two-hour movie will not cram the entire complexity of the novel I wrote into its 120-minute running time."

"And that’s fine, and as it turns out, necessary. Movies are not books. Movies are adaptations of books, for another medium entirely. When filmmakers try to make their movies simply a “faithful” version of the book that runs at 24 frames a second, the results (speaking as a former full-time professional film critic) tend to be dreadful more often than not. I don’t want a movie of Old Man’s War that’s a retread of what I’ve already done in the book. What I want is an adaptation and interpretation of what I’ve written that’s interesting and exciting, and is faithful to the idea and feel of the universe I created."

It's been a long time since I saw the LOTR films (and never bothered to see The Hobbit, so I can't comment on those), but, as I recall, that's more or less what Peter Jackson did.