[DCBryan1]

and bring back the Scouring of the Shire?

Yes...and Tom Bombadil!

[Olog-hai]

That character always confused me. Bombadil started out as a poem of Tolkein’s published in 1934, three years before The Hobbit came out (”The Adventures of Tom Bombadil”), unrelated to the story initially.

[The_Reader_David]

and bring back the Scouring of the Shire? Yes...and Tom Bombadil!

And scrub out the extended scenes that were put in solely as an excuse for producing video-games based on them.

I had some sympathy for the added elements in the movies based on The Hobbit that had a basis in the Tolkien canon -- Gandalf's support of Thorin's quest was part of the actions the White Council took in reponse to the rise of "the Necromancer" (Sauron) at Dol Guldur, and being told for movie audiences who had already seen LOTR it made sense to put them in. That, however, would have made a good sequence of two films, not three.