Even Tolkien said people probably wouldn't like The Silmarillion unless they were really deep into the world; "there's no Hobbits in it!"
Plus by this point we've met most of the major races and stuff, the feeling of "a whole new fictional universe" is gone.
But the Hobbit has all sorts of stuff we didn't see in LOTR.
****I'm really excited even though this is just a teaser trailer.
One point I like, which comes from expanding the screentime a bit, is that they want to play up the Elf-Dwarf mistrust as a major theme of the story here.
That is, because Tolkien hadn't written LOTR yet when he made "The Hobbit", the Elves are kind of funny in it (singing in Rivendell) -- only later would he explain the Elf-Dwarf hatred.
So I see a lot of it being an expansion of what WAS in the original, the morality of friendship and revenge; i.e. Thorin doesn't like the Wood-Elves of Mirkwood, but the Men of Dale are friends with them, and the Men of Dale helped Thorin so he owes them.
Similarly, from on-set reports on AICN, apparently they play up that Thorin is a bit reluctant to go to Rivendell at first, but Gandalf has to convince him that Elrond is Gandalf's friend and thus will trust Gandalf that he should help Thorin.
This isn't ridiculous or anything; from the report it seems that Thorin is just hesitant for a moment at the suggestion of going to Rivendell after the Troll attack, Gandalf tells him that while Elves and Dwarves don't generally get a long he has no particular feud with Elrond, so for a brief moment we see Thorin weigh his options and decide that its the right thing to do ( the report stressed that it was very subtle, not some huge hyped thing).
I mean just, logically, at this point in Middle-earth's history moreso than LOTR, given that the Dwarves and Elves have hated each other for thousands of years, logically, wouldn't Thorin be a little hesitant to trust Elves? Indeed, the Wood-Elves of Mirkwood don't like him at all (though even Tolkien stressed that its because they got into an argument with an entirely separate group of dwarves, who even then felt partially justified in fighting Thranduil given that he'd kind of ripped them off by refusing their payment), though even they aren't presented as genocidally wanting to kill Dwarves on sight.
Indeed, one of the reasons that the Dwarves trust the Elves as much as they do in LOTR - enough to come ask Elrond for help in Rivendell at the council - is because of the help he gave them in "The Hobbit" -- so logically, because that hasn't happened yet, we should see more of the Elves and Dwarves *starting out* barely tolerating each other, even as Gandalf insists that their mutual distrust is pointless (which we get shown to greater or lesser degrees) -- which progresses to the point that by the *end* of LOTR, Gimli and Legolas become friends.
