So let me get this straight...

Smaug is so bad ass that one day long ago he just took a day trip up to the lonely mountain one Saturday morning, decided he wanted to kill an entire dwarf kingdom, and did so before lunchtime. Yet killing 13 measly dwarfs, a few of which appear to be either chronically obese, mentally handicapped, or both, takes him forever. He eventually gives up and flies away, cus killing an entire town full of people sounds much easier to him than killing 14 people.

How do dwarves even survive on their own in this world? I think the dwarves in Snow White were more badass than all but 2 of the dwarves in Thorin's company. In general, how do dwarf kingdoms not get their asses whipped by trolls, orcs, etc.? Since elves are so badass that 1 elf can kill like 30 orcs in the span of 2 minutes, and elves hate dwarves, why don't the elves send like 10-15 guys over to a dwarf kingdom to genocide the dwarves? Or enslave the dwarves.

I think my comment about Smaug was just a minor gripe, but the second comment is the fundamental reason why these Hobbit movies will never be as good as the original LOTR movies. One of the major flaws with the LOTR movies was that all of the physically diminuitive characters - the Hobbits and Gimli - were turned into comic relief. Gimli was a complete joke, yet apparently we were supposed to believe that he was capable of killing orcs by the hundred. So now you want to make 3 movies in which the main 14 characters are all little people? The way they wrote Gimli in the LOTR films backed them into a corner where now, dwarves have to be funny little midget people who kill by dumb luck instead of something much more believable.