Tampering with Tolkien's Lore in Rings of Power is Actually Justified

Some of accusations levied at it, like its excessive number of storylines, flat characters and frequently poor dialogue, are difficult to refute. But one of the most common criticisms is The Rings of Power being an unfaithful adaptation, which disregards the lore of Tolkien's Middle-earth in many places, most notably bringing together events which were separated by thousands of years.

However, it can be argued that such criticism is misplaced.

There is a long history of successful adaptations that significantly diverge from the source material in cinema and television. Furthermore, Amazon was hampered by only having the rights to The Lord of the Rings books and the information from their Appendices. So they could only adapt elements the Second Age described in the Appendices of The Return of the King.

The expanded material from The Silmarillion and more recent compilations of world-building notes by Tolkien, such as The Fall of Númenor, remained off-limits to them. (There were some vague areas, which allowed the showrunners to smuggle in things like the Trees of Valinor, but they could not take too many risks.)

And not only information on the Second Age in Appendices was fairly scant, just a brief historical material, laying out key developments, these developments were, as mentioned above, separated by thousands of years.

There were two momentous events which shaped the Second Age – forging of the titular Rings of Power, and the destruction of the Númenorean civilization, with the subsequent War of the Last Alliance against Sauron. And despite longevity of Dwarves and men of Númenor, none of them could conceivably witness both.

There were possible ways to work around that, such as making a big time skip, across which only immortal characters (Sauron, Galadriel, etc) would persist. However, that would have required making two entirely different mortal casts – not just different actors playing the same characters who retain their development from before the time skip (as House of the Dragon did).

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Plotting such a story would have been exceedingly difficult, so the reason for compressing the timeline is obvious.

Of course, it still remains to be seen, whether sacrifices for the sake of making the plot more comprehensible and digestible for an average viewer are going to pay off and result in a plot that's actually good.