That's flat out wrong. When I say that the writing in season 1 was garbage, it has nothing to do with the butchering of Middle Earth. Those are two separate issues. I'm talking about writing that Galadriel jumps off into the ocean hundreds of miles from land and expects to be able to swim to shore. I'm talking about writing a scene where a volcanic pyroclast like destroyed Pompei rolls over Galadriel and the humans and they almost all just shrug it off like it was nothing. All of them with the exceptions of Galadriel and Sauron should have been killed. I'm talking about writing in a few Numenorean ships that somehow have room for an entire army with horses and supplies for the army plus horses. Ships of Holding I guess.
These are certainly some of the more egregious challenges to any sense of verisimilitude which I think any good show requires. Instead, we are left with a show which quite obviously disregards physics in order to provide spectacle - at which it also fails. Contrivances drive the story forward, without any sense of consequence (physical, emotional, psychological) from prior states which have been demonstrated on screen - this even extends to dialogue, where characters frequently just talk past each other, without any sense of conversation, rifiing off of one word in a previous line of dialogue in order to create a false sense of logical exchange.
There were dozens of examples of horrible writing like that.
And I think this is the nub of it. It is the sheer density of these logical inconsistencies - stacked each upon the last - which sets RoP apart from anything I've ever before seen. The result is an edifice which lacks any kind of logical coherence.
Bumping into Sauron, and then Elendil while going for a swim across the Atlantic ocean - I mean, surely there are better ways to contrive these encounters?
Another good example from S1 is the Macguffin which turns the key which opens the gate which causes the water to rush down the channels which empties into the magma chamber which causes the volcano to explode. I mean...why? The answer, of course, is the spectacle of an exploding volcano - a momentary dopamine hit which disregards logic, physics, causality. Who and how and why this giant geological pinball machine exists is not addressed.
That, and the obsession with retconning aetiological stories, and the origins of motifs - "This is how Mordor came to be; this is why Gandalf said this to Merry; this is where mithril comes from'" etc.etc. etc.
Why build a tower wrapped in chains? So you can blow it up and it looks cool.
In the latest episode, the orcs use catapults to destroy a mountain so that it blocks a river so they can walk across its now-dry riverbed. Where did the water go? Don't know, but it's cool, right?
"Prepare for ground assault!"
Didn't see any AT-ATs, though.
