Many people wrote “they are not feeling it”, “it doesn’t feel like Tolkien”. After getting a good nights sleep after the second episode, I think I know why. When Lotr came out in cinema, fans hated the first trailer. “That’s not how I imagined it!”, because they knew the story and the characters from reading the book (or watching the old cartoon movie). They already had the world mapped out in their brains, knew how Gollum would behave, how the Elves and humans would interact. Remember the shitstorm because of Arwen saving Frodo in the first movie? Imagine that today.
The fact that the series does not “connect” like the movies is your expectation - and that you don’t know what comes next. It’s thousands of years before the films that inspired the show, but it tries to do its own thing in a slower pace due to being a series. We’ve seen already around 2 hours, in FotR we would have been in Moria now and gotten a lot of fighting and suspense. That’s how movies and series work: One of them needs to fill the screentime rationally, the other one can do some side stories to fill up blank spots that we’ve never realized where there. Kind of why The Last Jedi felt more like a TV show with the sudden fuel problem that we’ve never heard of before.
A TV show of a known IP will always struggle with expectations, with what people thought it might be. Heck, the same goes for video games like Last of Us Part II.
Me for my part will give it a chance to stand on its own footing. Does it need to be another GoT? Hell no. Another LotR ripp off? Also no.
Sure it has it’s flaws. But only looking for them instead of trying to finally enjoy another ride into Middleearth is something I won’t do anymore.