> And his absence from the films was remarked upon, negatively in my circles.

Yeah, same. On Tolkien forums in the early to mid 2000's, I think these were the most commented on complaints about the movies:

* No Tom Bombadil

* No Scouring of the Shire

* Movie Faramir vs book Faramir

* The Ents deciding to not help Merry and Pippin at first (tbh, this is the one that still gets me the most. It sort of ruined a key attribute of the Ents just for a tiny bit of extra tension for a short scene.)

I'm probably missing some, but those were the ones I remember coming up the most.

Don’t forget the how the entire character of Gimli the dwarf was replaced with some sort of clown.

They lost me at dwarf tossing.

The axe to the ring was bad enough, but when the character later explicitly suggested that they go through Moria, ranting about food and beer, that’s when I knew we had gotten a clown on our hands. By the time the tossing was discussed, I was thoroughly disillusioned about the character, and expected no better.

With that one line of dialog I was snatched out of this carefully crafted fantasy world and pulled back to our (rather sad) present.

No Saruman vs Gandalf rematch in the original films. It was included in the director's cut but then you could see why they left it out.

Witch King vs Gandalf in the movie distorted a key point about the wizards: they were tasked to assist humans and elves against evil, but not to use their power to defeat the enemy on their own, or to rule over Middle Earth. Saruman tried do do both, and lost eternity for it. Peter Jackson understood that, but chose for theatrical reasons to sweep it aside, just as he did the enigma of the Old Forest and the (in Tolkien's own words) "most important chapter in the book" on the Scouring of the Shire (the author compared it to "the situation in [Britain] after the war").

Well, in literary fandom generally, anything other than faithful transcription from page to screen often generates outrage.

I was mainly irritated that the ents had knees.

That the whole Sauron business was a local and temporary nuisance seems central to the roles of Tom B and the ents. The ents' complaint was, in the end, only with Saruman.