They make a good salve for that!
Hehehehe - There are parts of the movie that chap my bum too... but not that part. (Mine is the Galadriel Halloween Ghost part)
There are parts of the book that I read through and wonder - Now why didn't PJ just leave it this way? Other places it worked to change the dialogue and I like it just fine.
I am reminded of when we were remodeling our house. We knew what we wanted to do, which was basically to preserve as much about the house as possible, while adding a few new improvements. It is an heirloom house that I grew up visiting on every special occasion. It needed to remain the same house.
We hired an architect to help us with the planning, and he first came back with a drawing of a beautiful house that was just not ours. The little things that meant so much to us, were just a window, or just a wall, to him, and could be eliminated or moved.
As an architect, he saw our house as his palette... He wanted to put his signature on it... And had we let him, he would have created a beautiful, but different house.
He eventually came around to drawings which were exactly what we wanted. We used a couple of his ideas, but I am sure he wonders why we paid the big bucks to a designer so that we could design it ourselves.
To me it feels like the same conflict of emotions...
PJ put his own fingerprint on the story. His vision was beautiful. Some of us that were around before liked the old window more, but I am getting used to the new one, and the house is still ours.
At least that was in the book.
BTW, GREAT analogy you use, concerning the architect for your house (I'm a structural engineer who does residential design so that resonates with me).
I don't so much mind that PJ had a great "vision," but that so much of his "vision" seemed, coincidentally, to be based on political correctness. (Thus, the part about Arwen).
Why he felt he had to have a strong female character right off the bat, when in the second and especially the third books/films you have Éowyn, as strong a female character as you can imagine, I'll never figure out except he didn't want to tick off a "target" audience most of whom aren't interested in the books anyway.
(Oddly, two-thirds of Tolkien afficionados are male).