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I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
I have no strong opinions about Tolkien, and I have not seen the show, but I see this come up a lot, and I think the answer is surprisingly obvious to people who aren't deeply invested in the fandom. This applies to everything from the MCU to LotR to Star Wars and Star Trek and every other property you care about.
Creators of new productions will very often hire writers who are not loving and doting fans but just in it for the paycheck, toss the source material, and ignore established lore, and the nerds will cry: "How could you do that? Don't you know that will make it suck?"
The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.
All they care about - all they care about - is getting more eyeballs. If reboots, reimaginings, and woke recastings will do that, that is what they will do. The tiny angry fists waved by a hundred thousand screaming fanboys is as nothing to the millions of (mostly young and not familiar with or invested in the source material) viewers they need to attract.
Now, an argument can be made that the work was popular in the first place because it was good, and tossing everything that made it good will make it bad. Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't. And of course bad writing is bad writing, so if RoP is bad because the writing is bad, it has little to do with how faithful the writers were to Tolkien and more to do with the fact that the writing is bad. Would it have been good if the writers were totally committed to Tolkien's vision? Who knows; maybe, probably not.
But fans really need to stop expecting that production studios care about whether it's "faithful" or "destroying the IP."
As for your other point: yes, they really do care more about making money than "pushing an agenda." They (the suits) will push an agenda if they think the agenda will make money. Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable. You'd see the whitest of all-white productions of the next Black Panther movie if suddenly black people stopped going to the movies, white people stopped watching anything with black people in it, and corporations no longer had to worry about how "lack of diversity" might affect the box office and critical reception (which affects the box office).
I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"
Yes, this is their attitude, and it is objectively wrong. Wide appeal never works without hardcore buy in. The hardcores are the tastemakers of virtually every IP, perhaps rom-coms excepted, I don't know much about that area. "But League of Legends" you will exclaim. Well, first DOTA2 is still incredibly successful despite being punishingly hardcore, and second, its weird you aren't touting the overwhelming success of the super casual Heroes of the Storm, which even had the benefit of tons of loved characters! Fact is, it was way too casual, it couldn't succeed even with you being able to make Jim Raynor fight Diablo and Arthas fight Kerrigan. LOL is the example of what you want to do, balance hardcore appeal and skill expression with the ability to be a bit casual. This is actually what early MCU did. Hardcores enjoyed Iron Man and Captain America. Hardcores don't enjoy She Hulk, and its tanked.
As someone who was quite into Heroes of the storm and was regularly a top 200 player I think you misdiagnose it's failure. The primary reason it flopped wasn't because it was too casual, it was because it was too team oriented. From the bottom up it was a game that required team coordination to such a degree that solo queue players felt they couldn't impact the end result of the match very much. Five 2k rated players on comms would beat the 3k rated player with 4 average pubs every time. In DOTA or league a carry, and they're literally called carries which gives the reasoning away, would be able to dominate their lane and then use that advantage to by them selves win the game. In heroes you can win the solo lane as hard as you want, but the coordinated team will have taken every objective and you'll be a lower level anyways. They tried to mitigate this a bit with stacking characters but those are even better with a team that can help you stack.
This makes the game hard to catch on for a few reasons:
Very difficult to stream. People watching a stream want to interact with the top player and watch them play well. In Heroes top players are all practicing comm discipline and following shotcallers which can be fun to watch but is really not the standard streaming experience.
People like to at least aspire to be the ones who carry games, this is reflected in the incredibly high pickrate of stacking abilities even when they are suboptimal. This was mechanically not supported by the game.
Solo queue play is the primary way people engage in mobas and heroes just didn't have a very good solo play experience
HotS had a really rich and deep meta game that was a ton of fun, especially because it mostly skipped the tedious laning phase and the interesting strategy started from minute one and continued the whole relatively short match without much of a foregone conclusion late game. But if you can't find 4 other dedicated players that you enjoy queuing with it was not a great experience.
HOTS does have some depth, but I think you are seriously underrating the skill expression of DOTA or even LOL laning and what that brings to a hardcore fan that well, listening in on comms cannot. Shotcalling and cooperation is certainly a skill, but it isn't one that gamers have really cared about, so its still a point of not understanding the audience if you build a game around it.
And lets not confuse ourselves here. HOTS might have depth, but that is wholly accidental on Blizzard's part, just like wavedashing was wholly accidental on Nintendo's part in SSBM. They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.
It's a very different kind of game than the others. I'm of the controversial opinion that any real time PvP game not overly filled with rng taken seriously will have pretty much unreachable depth because difficulty is derived by an opponent using the same tools. HotS trades things like the item shop and carefully last hitting minions for precise team rotation and timings being paramount. What I'm definitely not saying is that DOTA and LoL lack depth, they're obviously very deep and require very strong technical skills to succeed, which I've laid out is probably something that makes them more popular. But I always feel the need to push back against the kind of sneering reception Heroes gets as a "casual" game because someone who played thousands of hours of league loads up the game, plays it like league and doesn't understand that there are other ways to outplay your opponent(s) than last hitting/denying 10% more minions than your lane interlocutor until you can snowball out of control.
Heroes actually predates the lootbox craze and didn't have them until loot 2.0 after the game had pretty much already flopped. I know I'm sounding like a fanboy but the game really did feel like an effort of love rather than a cash grab. I'm not much of an activision/blizzard fan anymore and am well aware of their deserved soulless corporate reputation. They tried lots of weird and creative stuff that I don't think the other mobas would have to guts to do. They could have done what league did and basically just copy the style of dota allstars with some tweaks but instead they greatly changed the formula.
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