Well, jaded is a possibility, but I don't personally see it like that. I first discovered The Hobbit in the school library when I was about 8, and it was one of the old hardbacks with the fold-out map and the dusty, musty book smell, which I've loved ever since. I saw the Bakshi animation at some point, and I loved that, too - the rotoscoping was pretty crude, but I just loved the tone and approach, which fit my vision of the world.
I'm not some purist or expert on the books, but when you say Tolkien has always been about a feeling, for you, I agree - it's just that I have perhaps more specific feeling in mind, and my response to adaptations is going to be somewhat dictated by that.
I didn't like the Hobbit movie trilogy, either. To me, that failed in terms of my own prejudices about how it should be done, but I also thought the films were just not very good, in terms of writing, pacing, direction, and so on. I just feel pretty much the same about ROP.
With regard to the shenanigans around it, I think two things can be true - that there are people with some political bug up their arse being reflexively hostile, and also that it might deserve criticism. I remember the Ghostbusters remake, and there was clearly a lot of ugly stuff being thrown around about it, so I went to see it anyway. And I thought it sucked very badly indeed. Nothing wrong with the concept, but I remember talking about it in the pub afterwards, and we were talking about an ideal female cast, and approaches that might have worked. I do think that that they conflated the trolling with legitimate criticism, as a kind of sword and shield to defend their product.
I don't think ROP is nearly as bad as that, but I can definitely understand people holding the honest opinion that it's not good.