Carousel Beast: I'm one of those. It doesn't change the fact that the movies were poor adaptations of the books.

Get off your high horse. The Jackson films were the about the best adaptations you were going to be able to expect. The basic plot and the major themes were preserved, necessary concessions for the sake of a modern audience had to be made (and were without compromising plot or theme), and content had to be necessarily cut.

Audiences were never going to get a translation of the books to film, only an adaptation. The very fact Jackson managed to coherently adapt the book to film was remarkable in and of itself. You sorely underestimate the amount of content in the book, the amount of it that had no way whatsoever to even translate to film let alone coherently, and let alone how much of it just wouldn't have played well on film.

Would you rather have gotten nothing, or something that attempted to stay as true to the book as possible at the cost of coherence and the ability to draw in a crowd?

Wookie Milson: It wasn't left out completely, it was shown in the Mirror of Galadriel scene.

That's what I was about to say. Considering that, and the fact Jackson played up the anti-industrialist and environmentalist themes also present in the Scouring of the Shire that nobody seems to remember through Isengard itself, it's an acceptable concession for the sake of modern film-making and modern audiences.

The conclusion of a B-plot arc with its own rising action and climax, in the middle of a larger denouement after the eucatastrophe, would not have played well with audiences or translated well to film.