LOTR: Excellent pacing, lots of suspense, amazing sets, good cinematography, decent casting.
Hobbit: Terrible pacing leading to little suspense, cheap sets, awful cinematography with very awkward angles, mediocre casting.
In The Hobbit, Jackson makes the particularly noob-director mistake of trying to feature far too many characters. Nor does he give us much reason to care about them. Compare the OK Dwarven song in Hobbit 1 with the first encounter of the hobbits with the Nazgul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Interestingly, this fundamental scene is set up by special effects, but you've also got the nice touch of the creepy crawlies trying to get away from the Nazgul and Frodo's weird (but later understood) response. This scene sets up the whole trilogy: the pitifully out-of-their-depth hobbits vs the servants of evil.
The main problem with LotR, changing the storyline, gets worse in The Hobbit too. Obviously we didn't give Jackson a hard enough time about it.