Not really - the EE appeal to many, but those many are still a much smaller audience that the theatrical cuts got. The LOTR EE could almost be a textbook case, and good evidence the director/producers and studio exec. aren't fools who have no idea what they're doing.

If we listened to fans of books (LOTR, HP, others) - and that includes myself sometimes - everything should be included and they (we) groan about nearly all cuts and changes.

That's not the recipe to make great movies, and great movies that will have popular/critical appeal beyond the far more limited readership (no matter how big, even HP's is small compared to the audience for the movies).

Nowadays everyone is a couch director/editor and VFX specialist who think they know better than the pros. Problem is, amd I've seen it enough at work, is that it's not a process that can be done in your head imagining things. Directors during the process have these "great ideas" that the editor tries, and that when you step back and watch prove not to work at all. People are convinced adding 4-5 minutes to include this or that arc would have been great, but had they been included they might well have realized those extra scenes, or even extra lines in scenes, is what would kill the movie. Some of those are terribly obvious, like I'm pretty sure FOTR would have been a disaster had they tried to include Bombadil, or even just the full version of the Council (any council at all was pushing their luck, though Jackson got himself out of that trap quite nicely in the original cut of the movie).

So, Jackson and his team scripted a whole lot of things, cutting not enough material from the books and not finding right away the optimal ways to translate this and that to the screen, and they filmed a lot of what was scripted. In the editing room they realized a lot of that didn't work. The theatrical cuts of LOTR are a bit the best of both worlds, coherent stories, kind of faithful, but already flirting with the tolerance of mass audience for complex stuff and very long movies. But they're tight, careful not to bore, with really a lot of attention put on pace and rhythm. When it's about to get too long and appeal only to book fans, it moves on. Whether ones likes the adaptation and tone or not (a matter of taste, and tolerance for what's done with Tolkien's stuff), it's really top notch quality entertainment, the kind modern Hollywood seemed to have lost the recipe for after the early 80s (so would say much earlier, with some "old fashioned" oddities appearing later, like SW, Indianna Jones, a lot of Spielberg movies etc.).

The EE aren't bad, in some ways I prefer to watch them than the theatrical cuts (that bother the book fan in me a bit), but the one time I've seen them in the theater, it was excruciating. The rhythm/pacing are all wrong, there are many storytelling compromises, and sometimes it ends up mimicking Tolkien's own pacing/balance problems! You need to be a fan of the book, or have become a great fan of the movies, and have a high threshold of tolerance to extremely long movies with a lot of digressions and "soft"/too long parts, far less optimal use of scoring etc. At home, in a certain mood, they're quite enjoyable. Some things seem to make more sense, or leave more room to character moments. But they're hardly "better movies" even though for many big fans they might be a better/most satisfying viewing experience. The EE would probably never have even been considered by the Academy, and the most competent reviewers would have been really harsh with Jackson's direction and editing had he released those versions all along.

I'm not an editor, but I've worked alongside editors for 25 years. The EE of LOTR remind me most of what we call "first cuts"/offlines, when an editor assemble all the scenes as scripted, and tries to bring each scene to its optimal cut without worrying too much about the movie as a whole. You need to have that first to step back and look at it as an whole, be able to tell what works and don't. When that's done starts the process of trimming down, play around with scenes order, all the fine tuning to create patterns and stylistic editing effects - all that's require to edit the movie toward a final, optimal cut, and it's often the longest and hardest part of editing - it can last for months. Massive changes to the story as scripted and to the storytelling in general gets made in that stage. The EE of LOTR are like a first cut that's been further polished up, summarily trimmed down of everything that was too bad to include and sent straight to the finalization processes (additional VFX, compositing, scoring etc. as most was already done for the theatrical cuts) They're not botched, Jackson put a lot of efforts into the EE too, but the optimal version he could get with the material is pretty much what he and his studio settled for with the theatrical cuts.

So you're just the type who loves a good tight movie more than he desires to have as much of the book material as possible thrown in, no matter if it harmed the movie doing that. You're not alone, I know several people, more of them not book fans, who had loved the movies but can't stand the EE.