Personally I really liked it but I think there was too much green screen.
I really think that these three movies will be a lot closer to the books than the LOTR movies were. The humor, silliness, songs and poems are in "The Hobbit" and the LOTR series, they skipped most of that and just decided to try to make the LOTR movies more serious and badass and the Hobbit more like the book.
As far as the stuff with the Orcs goes, every movie has to have it's own plot along with a continuous plot of the trilogy or it would be boring.