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Here's a question for you that is less war and more straight culture. What makes a piece of media truly inspiring? What qualities does something need to possess so that things based on it will be great? I don't mean this in the sense of expertly turning your IP into a multimedia franchise through judicious licensing or whatever. I want to know what happens in the case of something like Dune where licensing doesn't seemed to be handled well at all. Yet it still not only managed to spawn a great movie. It also inspired a legendary board game, hugely influential video game, etc.
What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?
I guess I'll throw my hat into this ring: to leave aside your specific examples, I suppose that it depends not only on the source material, but how to use its tropes. Maybe also other factors like how nerdy are the licensors and how memeable the IP can be.
Okay, I lied, I still had your specific examples in mind when I typed that sentence, but I'll use them to demonstrate my points in a way that can potentially generalize:
Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness. I'd heard that the Lynch movie was an honest-but-failed attempt at adapting the book, I knew about Dune II and how it spawned Command & Conquer and the rest of the RTS genre, I knew about some of the concepts (albeit if only because they happened to be referenced in TV shows I watched, like Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy).
I finally read the original novel a couple years ago and it blew my mind. Before, I saw it as a sci-fi epic for those with more elitist (read: pretentious) tastes, but afterwards I got it, I thought it truly deserved its place as a sci-fi classic. Again, though, something about it isn't quite as "proletarian" as, say, Star Wars. It's a thick and dense novel (quite literally, even with my paperback copy being the recent-ish edition by Ace/Penguin and being reasonably-sized dimensionally), and it's also technically incomplete on its own (that "I consume your energy" quote I've seen thrown about here and on the old subreddit a few times? That's from Messiah, the sequel novel that was originally supposed to be part of the original novel). It's political in every sense of the word, and the "elitist" vibe I got from it is because its message can be easy to miss (Messiah reportedly came as a shock to fans of the original who now saw Paul recast into the role of a galactic asshole--Herbert's intended message of warning against hero worship was probably undermined by, again, needing to chop off Messiah's story into its own thing). Still, Dune can be boiled down into a classic and relatable story about an unlikely hero who is tarnished by the world around him, even when he changes things for the better. The problem may just come down to the investment energy requirements.
LOTR, which I admit to not really reading or wanting to experience, may seem at first glance to have similar challenges. Isn't that source material also huge, with a lot of stuff to digest? Well, yes, but that doesn't stop its fans. It may just be because Peter Jackson got an incredible amount of opportunity to adapt Tolkien's work in more managable chunks, and with somewhat more deft care than David Lynch could afford back in the 80's. I think one factor, though, is that the movies gave people things to point to, in the form of memorable scenes, quotes, and memes. Through gargantuan effort, LOTR was boiled down to its more essential elements, then transmitted memetically in a way that people could latch onto and get invested through. By contrast, Dune mostly had references to the more memorably-bonkers stuff from the Lynch film for years.
The other thing is the worlds of these, well, worlds, and how enticing they might be to explore. I think a big problem you had with your OP was phrasing: perhaps you meant to ask why Dune has so much potential that was kind-of squandered, versus LOTR which was handled generally-well but hasn't rippled beyond itself in quite the same way as Lynch Dune or Dune II. To which, I'd answer that Dune and LOTR have had vastly-different impacts on their respective genres, and while no LOTR thing has changed a medium quite like some Dune things have (again, outside of the Peter Jackson movies, possibly), LOTR doesn't need to further define other categories of works in its own image. Both settings, however, do have their fans who might love to explore those worlds. Any franchise has the potential to go bonanza like this if the cards are right.
I read the books in my early 20s and recently re-read the first 3 books in honor of the movie coming out and was immediately immersed. I completely agree with you that it deserves it's place as a classic.
I think the "problem" with adapting Dune and the reason that it has the reputation for esotericism that it does is that so much of the story and world-building happens "off screen" as it were. It happens in the little snippets of in-universe media that introduce each chapter, it happens in the footnotes about the empire's economy, and it happens in little vignettes were a piece of music will remind some character of an incident from their childhood. This works well when presented in the original format as an illustrated serial or as a bound book, but it presents challenges in adaptation. A classic example is the famous(infamous?) banquet towards the middle of the first book. For the those unfamiliar the book basically starts out as a spy thriller. The Atreides family (our protagonists) know they are being set up but not by whom or to what purpose. Paul Atreides is working the room at a state dinner trying to get a read on who the various factions are and who is plotting with whom. In prose it's a fairly important scene that establishes a couple of recurring themes, forshadows some of the main characters' future choices, and it advances the ongoing mystery plot by giving the audience some clues. However, if you were to do a straight translation of it to stage or film what you would get is basically 5 minutes of Paul making small-talk with a bunch of minor functionaries/side-characters while everyone else sips whine and looks pensive. It's just kind of hard to stage a scene where most of the action is happening in the form of internal monologues.
Edited to Elaborate
Yeah, it's a shame that amazing scene has been left out of both film adaptations, but at the same time, I don't know how you could include that in filmic form without going all Edgar Wright on Dune. And as you note, that's just one example of something that makes Dune difficult to process into other media.
Edgar Wright's Dune is an alternate history production i didn't know i needed.
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