If you look into it on youtube there's good reasons why The Hobbit films were so bad.
Unsurprisingly it more or less comes down to studio interference/pressure.
Peter Jackson didn't really want to make them, had his hand (sorta) forced by the studio canning Del Toro, made them up as he went along while getting no sleep, etc.
Everything was rushed, too, so you ended up with a bunch of weird, shitty CGI that didn't look remotely convincing compared to the CGI in films that came out 10 years earlier.
Obviously very interesting to compare how that trilogy was made as compared to LOTR. Makes the LOTR trilogy seem frankly miraculous, given the potential there was for the studio to stick its stupid oar in and fuck it all up.
The one scene in the whole Hobbit trilogy/debacle that makes me wish Peter Jackson could have had the right backing to make a Hobbit movie (or even movies, if he musthave) is the "riddles in the dark" scene, which is masterfully directed and performed (I often feel a bit ambiguous about Martin Freeman but I thought he was pretty perfectly cast here).